Consider a professional athlete whose career is over by his mid to late-30’s. His mind may not accept the reality that at such a relatively young age his time has come and gone. But his body of work is diminishing to the point everybody around him knows it’s over. The team coaches, his agent, his honest friends, have “the conversation” with him. Go out on top. Let people remember you as a winner. Don’t hang on for no good reason.
Most listen. Some don’t. They refuse to leave the stage. Tom Brady aside, this is almost always a sad saga. A once successful player, struggling mightily in a depressing drama played out for all the world to see. Now imagine that same player got their career start by having sex with the team owner. And you have Chelsea Handler. Or Kamala Harris. But this story is about Chelsea Handler.
Handler wanted so badly to be famous in Hollywood. She staked out that Sarah Silverman-Esque turf where you’re a female comic who dares to talk as crude as a dude. You get blunt with sex talk and anything brash that only the men get away with. You’re the standup version of a morning shock jock. But the winners in this market are few and far between. For every Howard Stern, there are 1,000 guys on morning shows called “The Angry Jack and Pound Dog” show who will never rise above the local market. Or tell an original joke. And for every Sarah Silverman, there are 1,000 Chelsea Handlers who will rack up the dirty jokes in hopes of catching a break. Like a desperate dude at a bar who hits on every woman hoping one will be stupid enough to bite. Sometimes it works.
Handler famously sent out a sex tape-audition tape to Hollywood agents when she was looking for work. She was homaging the Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton sex tapes making the rounds at the time and making other untalented women famous. She was being banged from behind on the bed while telling agents why they should represent her. She claims it was all a joke, and simulated sex, which may be even weirder once you’re fully naked on all fours with a dude behind you. This should’ve been a signal to the industry. But somebody bit regardless. Men are not that hard to manipulate. Men in Hollywood even easier.
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Handler ended up in the industry and made straight away for a sexual relationship with the dude who ran E! Channel, Ted Harbert. Harbert was already a bigwig in the industry; he would later run all of Comcast/NBC and thereafter ABC Entertainment. He was 20 years Handler’s senior. As if that matters when you’re on the professional hunt.
Not long after their first sexual tet-a-tet E! announced the Chelsea Handler late-night talk show, Chelsea Lately. Funny coincidence. The show would be based on Handler’s celebrity-bashing jokes, basically, an endless string of Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan jokes. Habert must’ve known his new and convenient sex partner wasn’t going to cut it on her own, so E! arranged for a talented group of writers to pen Handler’s show. The producers added an incessant, insipid fake laugh track even though they had a live audience for the tapings. A little kicker in the guffaw department so the latest Khloe zinger would achieve audible laughter.
Handler achieved relative success thanks to E! its parent company NBC/Universal funneling its actors and actresses as guests on her show. E! has had a long history of not being able to produce any original shows, past KUWTK. The cupboard was pretty bare. So whatever Handler was bringing in seemed peachy by comparison.
Employees at E! were warned quite directly that nobody at work was to make mention of the fact Chelsea Handler was banging the boss. That’s an odd memo to receive at work. This meant everybody there was forced to take their obvious and rightful snickering to private DMs and laugh out loud at the local Quizno’s when having lunch. They didn’t need a fake laugh track to get rolling on the floor over this absurd situation. It’s one thing when the blonde with big boobs is secretly laying the company owner. It’s another when it’s on TMZ daily and HR tells you you have to pretend it isn’t going on.
Handler’s late-night show ran through 2014 when she decided it was time for her to grow as an artist. Meaning, she didn’t get the raise she asked for. Harbert was no longer around, replaced by a woman. That messed up Handler’s go-to career move. She convinced a then original-content starving 2014 Netflix to give her a show. She wanted to tackle the serious issues. Though she couldn’t name any.
The show took forever to get off the ground. It quickly went from a daily to a weekly, and the start date kept pushing back. By months at a time. Eventually, it was 18 months from announcement to airing. For comparison, the Empire State Building went up in less than 13 months. With 1930’s technology. Nobody could explain the time lag. Gin comes to mind. Or successive rounds of Netflix meetings where somebody raised the question, “How ironclad is our contract with her?”
Handler had told her professional writing team from Chelsea Lately to take a forever hike. Since they were the underpinning of her success at the E! talk show, they assumed they’d be coming with. Handler decided otherwise. When your ego fills up an entire room, there’s no space for invites. Key show writer Heather McDonald would later say working for Chelsea Handler was “hellish”; probably true, but also bitter grapes for not coming with. In the end, it was Handler who suffered in the breakup.
Netflix was beginning to hire real producers and real industry executives at the time to get serious with their original content. They must’ve noticed the Handler show was a trainwreck, because they diminished the hell out of it from marketing campaigns before it even launched, and when it did, it aired a few sporadic times then let it wither on the vine, for a quick and eventual pruning. That’s when Handler got the idea. Not to honestly self-evaluate her talent level and likability. But to not fade gently into the mediocre talent pool goodnight. Tits were her solution. Granted, the options were limited.
There was literally nowhere to hide from Handler’s bare breasts. She posted and shared an endless array of kitschy topless and often bottomless photos she couched as comedic commentary on some trending Twitter issue. Any issue will do. When Twitter itself started curtailing her titty photos, she went topless in front of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Even the “you go girl” female empowerment drones were tested in their commitment to automaton approval.
Was this really to be filed reflexively under a brave woman showing that she could be every bit as shocking as a man and society would have to deal with it? Or just a sad stripper past her time trying to drum up the last ounce of dollar-tips from aging truckers at an Exxon filling station? You know how the voting went.
Handler refuses to quit. She’s a Norma Desmond of the social media age, posting pictures of herself skiing topless to remind people she still exists. I’m ready for my boob shots, Mr. DeMille. She jumped into “I want to have sex with Governor Andrew Cuomo” memes while the Governor was busy killing grandmas in nursing homes and sexually harassing his staff members. Anything to be on-trend. So long as it relates to being naked or talking about sex or expressing even a hint of talent.
There’s a common myth that men are drawn to women who brazenly talk about sex or flash their tits. Men are drawn to hot women no matter their personality. From there, the obnoxious ones under any personality disorder become increasingly less tolerable. I can’t speak for what draws women to other women, fan-wise, but if the numbers and fan base and career path are any indications, the women aren’t coming back for Chelsea Handler’s nude revue either. Check the join-by dates on her social accounts. Twitter and Instagram do not trim followers from a decade ago, ever.
Roughly 100% of self-announced “female empowerment” celebrity stories on social involve a celebrity having to appear naked. This followed by a hooting chorus of female media channel sycophants reflexively genuflecting to the “clap back” at the single anonymous Twitter account troll with seven followers who made an insulting comment. Kevin James would be unanimously laughed off the platform if he said he lost 20 pounds and posed in bottoms-only. Including by the likes of Chelsea Handler. And rightfully so. But there go the gender double standards always favoring men. Male empowerment is so far-fetched it can’t even exist in fake news on Twitter.
The 1970s had a celebrity named Charo. It was unclear what Charo did to earn her celebrity status, but she was a guest star on numerous TV shows and a constant fixture on kitschy entertainment programming.
Charo shook her buxom Latina body, exotic for the time, played Flamenco guitar, and always smiled and laughed extra hard. She was the alt-positive version of Chelsea Handler. Completely sufferable despite a lack of obvious talent because her whole identity was wrapped up in a Santa Claus-like mirth and joy. She’s who you’d want around after a disaster. Handler lacks any of that ebullience or smile-inducing personality. She’s the cringe punchline without the benefit of any worthwhile setup. A slip on a banana peel, but not by the evil oil magnate who deserves a fall, but a kindly old lady who’s now shattered her hip and will likely die soon in convalescence.
Everybody loves tits. I know this statistically from years of selling them to both men and women online. But desperate tits are not happy tits and there are fewer buyers. The crack-addicted homeless woman who forgot her dirty shirt that day is not alluring. Granted, men will still look, but they won’t linger. They certainly won’t bother to engage in small talk. They too will quickly turn away and leave the uncomfortable situation. That uncomfortable situation is Chelsea Handler. I bet she knows it.
