During an appearance on Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You podcast, Chelsea Handler voiced her issues with some of the jokes comedians Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe made during the recent Netflix roast of Kevin Hart.
As seen in a clip from the podcast below, Handler said that she’s “pretty secure” in herself so she didn’t mind when comedians joked about her being “a whore” during the roast, but insisted that the jokes at her expense weren’t “clever writing.” She referred to their material about her as “lazy,” but it didn’t surprise her because she was already familiar with Gillis and Hinchcliffe.
“I knew enough about, like, Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane and their backgrounds,” she said. “I had girls, ex-girlfriends blowing up my DMs that had dated Shane and were telling me stuff about him. So based on that, I was like, ‘Oh, these guys are pretty bad.’ … It's just everything we know, that they're racist, that they're bigots, that they're sexist, you know, that they think they're, like, invincible, that they've been canceled for being… Shane got fired from SNL but then was on SNL years later. So he got fired. So what happened in between those two events? So he believes, this is per one of his exes, that he's invincible.”
Gillis was hired as a Saturday Night Live cast member in 2019, but was fired less than a week after the announcement due to controversy surrounding a podcast clip in which he used Asian ethnic slurs. He has since appeared on SNL three times after he was fired, hosting the show twice and showing up for a cameo during another episode.
“It was gross. I don't find those jokes to be funny,” she continued. “Jokes about lynching Black people, or, like, lynching is not a joke. That's worse than rape. Like you're not joking about rape, are you? Are you saying I'm going to go rape you? You know you can't do that, but you can say lynching. Like I find that to be... I don't know, you know, people are like, it's a roast, you go for it. I'm like, you can go for it without being gross.”
She also took issue with the jokes about Sheryl Underwood’s husband, who died by suicide in 2011.
“I found them making fun of Sheryl Underwood's dead husband who committed suicide, like, you know, she's fine with that. If she says she's fine with that, she's fine with that. I wasn't fine with that,” she said. “I thought that was disgusting, too. But there was so much disgustingness that I knew it was going to be such a gross vibe, that I would be able to elevate it, no problem. And that's what I wanted to do. I was like, all right, well, I'll pick it up because they're gonna try and bring it down. And Kevin didn't deserve that. He deserved, like, an elevated roast.”
On a recent episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, which is co-hosted by Gillis, Underwood insisted that she wasn’t offended by the jokes about her husband and said she doesn’t want people to be offended on her behalf.
“We cracked jokes when he died,” she shared, as seen in the clip below. “Sometimes humor is the thing. It’s the most uncomfortable humor that really lessens the tension and the stress. … Don’t be offended for me if I’m not offended, but be offended for your point of view.”
Gillis, who sat between Handler and Hart during the Netflix roast, caught a lot of attention for some of the jokes he told at Handler’s expense. “Chelsea is a Zionist. Not saying that’s a good or bad thing. Speaking of dead kids, she’s a big fan of abortion,” he said during one moment that went viral, while another moment saw him call attention to a dinner she attended at Jeffrey Epstein’s home.
She responded, “Shane, just so you know, Judaism and Zionism are two different things… Just like how Chinatown and Koreatown are two different things, but your favorite slur works in both places.”
