Crowned one of Vanity Fair’s “Queens of Comedy” and recently dubbed a 2011 “Woman of the Year” by Glamour Magazine, Chelsea Handler is one of the most widely recognisable faces both on and off the television screen. Safe in the knowledge that she has the titles of author, actor, host and comedian tucked under her belt, Handler continues to have an open invitation into the living rooms and onto the bookshelves of a substantial number of homes in the United States and beyond.
One of the few notable successful female comedians, accompanied in this category by the likes of Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman, Handler has become somewhat of a pioneer for the outspoken female voice in a business that is, lets face it, predominantly male. In this way, Handler has leveled the playing field for women in the industry.
Unashamed, uninhibited and unapologetic, Handler’s success with her breakthrough show, Chelsea Lately in 2007, has catapulted her into success, and positioned her under the watch of the unrelenting and pervasive public eye. Despite this, Handler has rarely been caught in a sticky situation, the only incident that comes to mind being the Amy Winehouse vs. Serbia controversy in 2011. This is, perhaps, because unlike so many of today’s celebrity figures, Handler capitalizes on both the pros and cons of her persona. Rather than waiting for the media to deconstruct her personal life, she presupposes the fiasco and does it herself, avoiding the unwanted discovery of any skeletons and allowing preparation and ammunition for the potentially necessary explanation of said scenarios. Nothing can be more unabashedly provocative, for example, than her first book, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands, in which she describes a plethora of her sexual encounters, or her blatantly expressed love of Belvedere in Are You There, Vodka? It’s me, Chelsea, her second book published in 2008.
In short, Chelsea Handler sells herself; not the media-constructed, child-friendly, politically-correct, pg-13 version, but the version that has explicit, parental-advisory, and uncensored written all over it, and she is all the more successful as a result. She does not have a specific target audience and therefore does not have one particular type of fan. Instead, Handler has mass appeal, simultaneously fulfilling the role of the unaffected fiery, fearless female and easy going, low-maintenance, ‘bro’, elements of her character that makes her a figure that both a male and female audience can identify with.
Chelsea Handler does not sugar coat herself, or wear rose-tinted spectacles when assessing her decidedly hot, funny-girl self in the mirror, made evident through the airing of After Lately in 2011, during which her audience gets taste of what it’s like ‘behind the scenes’ with the brazen host. She puts a refreshing spin on both reality and reality TV, in such a way that has enabled her to juggle her personal and public successes with bravado and comedic brilliance that is, thus far, unmatched.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Brown chapter.