Chelsea Handler isn’t done tearing into MAGA comic Tony Hinchcliffe, a week after her roast of the Donald Trump fan became the highlight of Netflix’s Roast of Kevin Hart.
Handler appeared on Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You Podcast on Wednesday, where she said that skewering the comic, as well as the evening’s host, Shane Gillis, was a no-brainer because they’re “not clever.” She added that she also knew they’d have little to retort in response to her when she was done blasting them.
“What were they going to say about me? They couldn’t say anything other than that I’m a whore or my age. I think that was the other thing that they went in on. And you’re like, well, OK—those aren’t jokes. That’s not clever writing.”
“And I knew they would be lazy because they do that for a living,” she continued. “I knew enough about Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane and their backgrounds. I had girlfriends, 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.’”
Pressed by Cole about what they told her, Handler said, “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—that they’ve been canceled for being like—Shane got fired from SNL but then was on SNL years later [as host]. So, he believes, this is per one of his exes, that he’s invincible.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to representatives for Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe for comment.
Handler roasted Gillis, who was fired from Saturday Night Live for using a slur on his podcast, about the irony of his being “accused of being anti-Asian” when he had the “complexion and physique of a steamed dumpling.” She added, “Shane, just so you know, Judaism and Zionism are two different things…just like Chinatown and Koreatown are two different things, but your favorite slur works in both places.”
Her most scathing jokes were aimed at Hinchcliffe, the Joe Rogan acolyte who made a name for himself by telling racist jokes at Donald Trump’s 2024 Madison Square Garden rally in an effort to “swing a few thousand votes” to Trump. “Tony, you have the face of a school shooter and the personality of someone who gets shot first,” Handler told him during the show.
Later, she quipped, “Tony, quick question: if you’re here tonight, who’s keeping Joe Rogan’s balls warm in their mouth?” and joked that he “must be using Crest White Supremacist Strips,” given his veneers and whitened teeth. Hinchcliffe responded by calling Handler a “cold frigid b---h.” Handler said she didn’t bat an eye. “I’m 51, so I’m pretty secure with who I am,” she said on Wednesday. She slammed Hinchcliffe and Gillis’ performances as amateurs.
“I mean, it was ick,” she said. “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?” she went on, addressing them. “You know you can’t do that, but you can say ‘lynching.’”
“People are like, it’s a roast. You go for it. I’m like, you can go for it without being gross. I find that to be gross. I found them making fun of Sheryl Underwood’s dead husband, who committed suicide…I wasn’t fine with that.” Handler said that being able to predict what kind of jokes they would tell only made her more confident that she would bring the house down.
“There was so much disgustingness that I knew it was going to be such a gross vibe,” she said, “Then I would be able to elevate it, no problem. And that’s what I went to do.”
