Chelsea Handler
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That is why, when texts keep arriving from my angry subject, I have to grab my phone from Handler to stop her from berating the caller.
"I get in trouble all the time," she tells me. "People threaten me, people demand apologies, entire cultures and races are mad at me. I don't buy into that. I just can't. I say what I want."
That willingness to discuss virtually anything onstage, in her books, on her television show--from her sexual fondness for midgets to her latest adventures in very personal grooming--has made her a national sensation. There have always been vulgar, explicit comedians, though rarely women, and never as successfully mainstream as Handler. She is, in a sense, the final iteration of decades of salty female comics, from Phyllis Diller to Joan Rivers to Kathy Griffin to Sarah Silverman, each of whom pushed the humor boundaries just as aggressively as her male peers but often with much less commercial success.
In comedy, timing is everything, and Handler was fortunate to emerge on the cultural scene concurrently with a national orgy of oversharing, when anything and everything is broadcast on blogs and social networks. She has become a symbol of our mania for compulsive and frank discussion of what in previous eras would have been divulged only to one's shrink or simply buried and left to fester in our deep, dark subconscious. But the bigger her empire gets, the more of a challenge it poses to her subversive and often alienating style of comedy. Being funny comes easy to Handler. Balancing her broad platform with her cutting and risqu humor--which often involves skewering her celebrity peers--might be a little harder. Handler rejects the notion that being in the Establishment may turn even the most subversive of voices a little hidebound. "My tone is never going to change--that's the essence. The moment you are asking, 'Is this responsible? Is this the right thing to say?' Then that means I'm in trouble."
Handler grew up in livingston, n.j., the youngest of six children born to a Jewish father, Seymour, and a Mormon mother, Ruth. From her books and her description of her childhood, Chelsea as a little girl comes across as Groucho Marx in a blond wig and hand-me-down Lee jeans--with a joint in hand instead of a cigar. At age 9 she lied to her classmates, claiming to be co-starring in a Goldie Hawn movie over the summer. At 12 she got herself hired to babysit kids two years her senior. That was the same year she stole her first pornographic videotape from her older brother and developed a serious crush on the family's plumber. "She always sought attention, not necessarily positive attention," says her sister Shoshanna, 41. "She gave our parents a real run for their money."
Her siblings have a theory that it was the death at age 21 of their older brother Chet, who fell while hiking in Wyoming, that transformed Chelsea into the extrovert she is today. The family entered a period of intense grieving after Chet's passing. Her father obsessed over the accidental death, even instigating legal action against a friend of Chet's who had been hiking with him. "It consumed us," says Roy. "It transformed our family."