Better than: Sitting on your coslopus at home and watching Chelsea Lately with your little nugget.
Chelsea Handler strode onto the Masonic Auditorium stage Friday night in fuck-me boots, impossibly tight jeans, and a gray and white silk blouse. While the amped-up crowd cheered and screamed, she grabbed her mike and threw the stand aside. With a moue of distaste, she used her red plastic cup - presumably filled with vodka, her beverage of choice - to knock a bottle of water from a stool onto the ground. "Won't be needing that tonight," her look said.
Handler started the show by apologizing for letting herself be booked into a venue that doesn't serve alcohol, and said she left a voicemail for Mayor Gavin Newsom to see if he could rectify the situation. Alas, Hizzoner seemed not to have gotten the message, so "I'll make it up to you," she promised.
Hecklers and rabid fans alike were treated to withering stares or sharp putdowns as she stalked the stage. However, Handler's disdain seemed to come and go. When audience members yelled that they loved her, sometimes she hissed, "Shut up," other times she offered a demure "Thank you." She teased a group of women in the front row and told them she loved them, but while they were still squealing and applauding, she walked away and rolled her eyes to the rest of the audience. We laughed at her, and by extension at them. We felt slightly mean doing it, but she clearly didn't.
Handler has a famously foul mouth that is, of necessity, reined in on TV. On her late-night E! talk show, Chelsea Lately, she has to get inventive - "coslopus" refers to the female undercarriage, while "shadoobie" is feces - but, free of those constraints in front of a live audience, she swore as she breathed. If we'd had a clicker to count the number of times she said "fuck" or "fucking" tonight, it would have broken.
On Friday, Handler's comedy didn't focus on the celebrities or has-beens she loves to rip into on her TV show, but instead took on more personal targets like men in tracksuits without underwear, low-hanging testicles in said clothing, cats ("They take a crap in a box and walk out like nothing happened. A box of shit covered with sand and pebbles."), the general ugliness of scrotums as opposed to coslopuses ("The coslopus is like a zoo. If you wanna go in, at least you've been warned first."), Russians, Asians (Handler is unapologetically obnoxious to all ethnicities), and her father, for dating his teenage Jamaican house cleaner after her mother died. These subjects seemed a little obvious and safe for someone as sharp-witted as Handler is, but the audience - a mixture of couples on date nights, suburban marrieds, teenage girls in "Nugget Lover" t-shirts and tiaras, and wisecracking gay men - lapped up everything she said.
We got a glimpse into a more lonely and less funny world when Handler talked about how, aged eight, she was finally invited to a slumber party and told they would experience "The Feeling." That turned out to be a group of girls lying facedown in a circle on a shag rug, frantically masturbating themselves to orgasm. Handler sounded genuine and not sarcastic as she related the tale, but you wonder how much truth is in her depiction of a little girl who took so enthusiastically to self-love that she even did it at the dinner table. "I had my soulmate," she said, pulling what she refers to as her "sad clown" face to show how she felt after coming. "But what if my coslopus wanted to break up with me?" Handler's physical demonstration of such prepubescent frottage went on for far too long and seemed calculated to play up her raunchy persona. That said, when a man in the audience shouted that she's a cougar, she seemed genuinely insulted and ranted at him for a good minute.
Handler prowled the stage, scanning the front rows for one last victim. She stopped and stared at me for a moment, then her eyes flicked to my friend, a self-described tranny in her best slutty librarian getup. We met her gaze squarely, and we saw her hesitate, just for a second. Then she turned on her heel and stalked toward three burly bears, who were delighted to be mocked for being gay in San Francisco (they are) and for being a triad (they aren't). Easy meat is probably a safe choice for someone on Handler's liquid diet.
Critic's Notebook
Personal bias: In her second book, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, Handler revealed that she briefly dated a man from Lewisham in southeast London, and then tried (very poorly) to convince some English strangers in a bar that she had grown up there. Since that is my hometown, I'd be happy to help her dress for the part in knockoff Burberry and show her how a council facelift is cheaper than Botox.
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