Chelsea Handler is facing notable public backlash for recent remarks on Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe‘s jokes at Netflix‘s Roast of Kevin Hart, which streamed live on May 10. The 51-year-old stand-up comedian, who was part of the special featuring a packed lineup of comedians, slammed them as “racist,” “bigots,” and “sexist.”
The controversy started when Chelsea Handler told Deon Cole on his podcast Funny Knowing You, released on May 20, “I knew enough about, like, Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane and their backgrounds. 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.”
Cole questioned whether she enjoyed any of the jokes made during the roast honoring Kevin Hart. She replied, “No. I mean, it was ick. It was gross,” and called out a few jokes that Gillis and Hinchcliffe made, with Gillis’ joke about lynching, where he said Hart is “so short, you’d have to lynch him from a bonsai tree.” “It was gross. I don’t find those jokes to be funny — jokes about lynching Black people. Lynching is not a joke. That’s worse than rape. You’re not joking about rape, are you? … You know you can’t do that, but you can say ‘lynching’?” expressed Handler.
Post the podcast, her comments quickly went viral. This sparked a wave of online backlash, with the internet criticizing her for being part of the Netflix special and for trying to cancel comedians for doing exactly what a roast is known for. “A roast being offensive is kinda the whole point though. You either lean into it or don’t sign up for one,” wrote an individual on X. Another commented, “It’s a rare thing to see a liberal white woman stand up and be offended. How dare they say offensive things at a comedy event that is purposely designed to be offensive?”
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This story originally appeared on Realitytea
