Comedian Chelsea Handler poses a problem for newspapers professing family content.
How is it possible to describe a standup act that speaks so matter-of-factly about the sexual function of everyday items such as duct tape, flashlights and rubber beads?
“It’s definitely not a G-rated show,” Handler said this week while driving on a Los Angeles freeway. “People definitely shouldn’t bring their kids. Or their parents. Unless their dads are single. And cute.”
Handler, author of “My Horizontal Life: A Collection Of One-Night Stands” and the star of “The Chelsea Handler Show” on the E! network, brings her raunchy perspective on sex, intercourse, coitus, copulation, fornication and just plain doin’ it to Comedy Works tonight and Saturday.
“It’s not too hard to describe,” Handler said of her act. “It’s about dating. And how annoying people are when they get married and how married people are such losers.
“It’s just a girl coming from a male perspective. It’s irreverent, very ‘Sex and the City’-ish.”
But Handler’s blond looks and brash hyperlibido – and the gaggle of slack-jawed straight men drooling over an attractive woman so open about sex – seem to put her closer to Jenny McCarthy than Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones on the zeitgeist scale.
“I’ve always had a mostly male audience,” Handler said. “If you’re attractive at all as a comedian, I guess that’s natural.”
Handler, who says she still hits the live stage about three times a month, long lived the life of a traveling comedian. Eventually, she played the Montreal International Comedy Festival and had bit stints on “Spy TV,” “The Practice” and “My Wife and Kids.”
An appearance at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen spurred a recurring gig as a correspondent on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. A job on “Girls Behaving Badly” on the Oxygen Network followed. She’s been rolling since.
Considering Handler’s penchant for jokes about drinking, memory loss and casually slipping to Vicodin addiction, she tempers her time in Aspen: “I barely remember that entire week. I blame the altitude.”
But only after the publication of Handler’s book and her show on E! has her female audience finally come out in force.
“So many single women can relate,” she said. “There’s a big female audience now, probably more than men. In the past few years, there’s a big difference.
“And now there are a lot of gay men and lesbians coming out. A lot of lesbians think I’m gay. It would be a lot easier if I were. But I can’t get behind the cowboy boots and the pickup truck. Or that haircut.”
Filming the first season of “The Chelsea Handler Show” wrapped last month after the network, pleased with the first eight episodes, asked for four more.
“I’m definitely happy with it,” she said.
Handler has in the works a half-hour special on Comedy Central and a part in a National Lampoon movie called “Cattle Call” that should arrive around the new year. And she has recently appeared on “Scarborough Country” on MSNBC.
With the success of “My Horizontal Life,” Handler has another book coming, tenatively titled, “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.”
“You can’t write two books about one-night stands,” she said. “Otherwise you can’t expect anybody to ever marry you. Especially if you want to marry twice.”
Nick Groke can be reached at 303-954-1015 or ngroke@denverpost.com
Chelsea Handler
COMEDY|Comedy Works, 1226 15th St. |TODAY AND SATURDAY|8 and 10 p.m. today; 6:30, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday|$25|303-595-3637 or comedyworks.com|Note: Sexually explicit
