thePULSEBy Len Sousa
Comedienne Chelsea Handler has the perfumed look of a West Coast beach doll and the brutal lip of a sea-weathered sailor ~ a combination that quickly unmasks the Los Angeles resident’s New Jersey roots. Born in Livingston “sometime” in the 1970s, Handler moved west after a year of college with the usual California goal in mind.
“I was gonna come out here to L.A. to be an actress,” she says, “but then I moved out here and I was like, ‘Hmm, this seems like it would be really hard to memorize all these lines. And I wasn’t really getting any parts so I figured if I went on stage and just did my own stuff, then it’s my own voice.’”
Handler’s independent spirit and unwillingness ~ or inability ~ to become someone else for entertainment value led to an accidental career in comedy. “I decided to start doing stand-up because I found out it’s the only job you can do while drinking,” she jokes. “So I decided to research that more thoroughly.”
The blunt portrayals of her effervescent sex life in her stand-up soon led to a four-season gig on the Oxygen network series Girls Behaving Badly, then to recurring appearances on The Tonight Show as an on-the-street reporter, and eventually to her own weekly program on the E! Channel, The Chelsea Handler Show.
On July 16th, her newest show on E! premiered. Chelsea Lately airs weeknights at 11:30pm and features the comedienne as the host of her own late night talk show. Handler describes the program as very pop culture oriented with live call-in segments and improvised comedy segments set in real world situations, a staple of her last eponymous show.
“We’ll have a bunch of comedians all comment on what’s going on in Hollywood that day; make it very true to date. So if Lindsay Lohan gets a DUI or Britney Spears is running around town showing off her Hot Pocket, we’ll be talking about it…We’re just gonna go off on all the Hollywood stuff.”
For most, a nightly television show might be enough to stay busy, but Handler has also recently finished her second book, Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, a quasi-follow-up to her humorous chronicle of sordid and assorted one-night stands, The Horizontal Life.
Due to hit book shelves next April, Handler explains, “It’s more of the same [style as the last book] except it’s not really focused on one-night stands since you can’t really write two books about one-night stands and expect anybody to marry you.”
For Handler, writing these memoirs has had the same effect as her stand-up. Taken from snapshots in her actual life, she’s successfully used her comedy to avoid the one thing she’s had the most trouble with: “Everything I get hired for now is to be myself and to improvise. So I don’t have to memorize any lines ~ and, when I do, it’s not pretty.”
