Chelsea Handler
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According to Shoshanna, Chelsea began acting out after that. "She was trying to get the attention she wasn't getting," she says. Chelsea agrees, adding that she was trying to lift her family's spirits. "Everyone was sinking. You want to elevate the mood. I was like, Everyone, look at me, look at me, I fell down!"
Ruth died in 2005. Seymour is described by Chelsea as a "failed used-car salesman," and in her books and comments, she is not kind to him, casting him as a "psychopath" and a "narcissist." But she does give her father credit for one brilliant investment: he paid $25,000 for 10 acres (4 hectares) on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1970s. Chelsea grew up land rich and cash poor. "We never had any money," she recalls. "We didn't have a car with working headlights, but we had this great summer house." Over the years, to pay for his brood's college tuition, Seymour sold off bits and pieces of the family's estate. "My dad was lucky," Chelsea concedes. "Once!"
She graduated from an alternative high school and moved to Los Angeles when she was 19, staying with an aunt and uncle while she tried to break into show business. She soon realized that she wasn't going to make a splash in the industry as just another pretty face showing up to audition. "I was not getting my personality across," Handler says. "The other girls were skinnier and prettier than me. I needed to do something to separate myself." She set up a video recorder in her living room and taped herself telling jokes about her waitressing job. She sent the VHS tape to the Comedy Store in Hollywood and that weekend had a spot in the lineup.
From the beginning, Handler, who had won beauty pageants as a teenager, found it natural to go onstage in jeans, a ponytail and no makeup. She played down her looks, calculating that it would make her more relatable. "It's worked out that way, but most of the time, I don't feel that hot," she says. "I honestly don't care about that stuff." Brad Wallach, a writer for Chelsea Lately who also performed stand-up on Handler's most recent tour, says, "I think she knows she's attractive, but that's never been part of her persona, and that helps make her seem more approachable."
That pretty but low-key manner, coupled with her brand of frank, sexual female humor--in some ways she follows in the footsteps of fellow Jewish-Mormon comic Roseanne Barr--quickly won over female fans. Her persona as the vodka-slurping, promiscuous bimbo who nicknamed her genitalia "the coslopus" somehow seemed to take the dark edges off the culture of hooking up--or at least made the rest of us feel a little better about whatever we might have been up to last Friday night. She began turning up in regular guest spots on E! and Oxygen, as a correspondent on NBC's The Tonight Show and as a regular on Oxygen's Girls Behaving Badly before landing her own E! show in 2006 and embarking on the first of several sold-out stand-up tours.