Comic and talk show host Chelsea Handler has revealed no shortage of introspective and often outrageous nuggets about her life over a span of six books going back 20 years.
Now she’s about to hit 50 years old come February and she’s finishing up a tour that includes her last stop of the calendar year in Atlanta at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on Sunday, Dec. 29. There are still some tickets left on Ticketmaster starting at $30.
“I feel pretty awesome about everything,” said Handler in a call with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I feel pretty grateful I’ve been able to create this awesome life for myself. I’m untethered to anyone or anything. I can get up and go to Rio in the morning. Often, I do stuff like that. Not having children or getting married has given me bandwidth for other people and actually be a figure in a lot of children’s lives. Nieces and nephews and miscellaneous children I’ve acquired over the years.”
Since 2021, Handler has been able to monetize her name and her skills via a successful weekly podcast “Dear Chelsea,” which she said is her audio version of Dear Abby, the longtime newspaper columnist of yore.
“I get to talk to real people about real life problems whether it’s their relationship or family dynamics or people my age wanting to make a career change,” Handler said. “I got all this from an expensive therapist. I can now regurgitate that advice to people who need it.”
She enjoys playing therapist to a degree. “I’m a big cheerleader and big sister,” she said. “I can be the nudge you need to make the decision you know you should make. I find getting an outside perspective who has no skin in the game is helpful.”
While she brings in celebrities such as Jennie Garth, Kevin Hart and Heather McMahan on the podcast, she is fine not having to keep up with celebrity gossip, which was her stock and trade on her talk show “Chelsea Lately,” a groundbreaking late night basic cable talk show on Comedy Central from 2007 to 2014.
She helped give exposure to fellow comics including Whitney Cummings, T.J. Miller and Heather McDonald with her freewheeling roundtable discussions on pop culture.
She said with basic cable now largely obliterated and streamers struggling to find any traction with talk shows, that formula may be dead.
“It all feels a bit stale,” he said. “We’re in a waiting period to see what happens. We’re in a transition period. We are going back to three major networks, but they’re streamers instead. I don’t know. It’s very confusing. It’s also not my problem.”
Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Handler has a seventh book coming out “I’ll Have What She’s Having” on her 50th birthday
Writing, she said, “is a great exercise that is different from my podcast or standup or TV work. It’s great for someone who didn’t graduate college to have six New York Times bestselling books. All my brothers have college degrees but zero books. I take a lot of pleasure in that as they will tell you. You have to read a lot to be a good writer. I read tons.”
This time around, she focuses on her childhood and her entrepreneurial tendencies. “I sold hard lemonade at age 8,” she said. “I realized regular lemonade wouldn’t make much money. So I sold lemonade with gin, whiskey and tequila to parents.”
Her parents, like many in the 1980s, were not the most attentive. “It becomes funny after the fact,” she said. “My siblings all have the same stories not getting picked up from school or our parents handing us a $100 bill to buy 65 cent pizza in the cafeteria. We all have good senses of humor because of it.”
She said she had aspirations as a young kid to grow up to “be loud, be brave and stand up for stuff. I wanted to travel and learn languages. I have accomplished all these things. Sometimes we forget the road we’ve taken. We can go through so much trauma and pain and hardship and forget how far we’ve come.”
IF YOU GO
Chelsea Handler
7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 29. $30-$75 Cobb Energy Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. ticketmaster.com
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