Chelsea Handler Biography

Chelsea Handler is a stand-up comedian, cable TV host and the author of the memoir My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands (2005) and the collection of essays Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea (2008). She grew up in New Jersey, and in the late 1990s moved to Los Angeles to start a career in comedy. Early on, she landed TV guest appearances and a regular stint on the cable comedy show Girls Behaving Badly (2002). Her career began to take off in 2005, with the publication of her memoir and with occasional “reporting” segments for Jay Leno‘s The Tonight Show. The next year she had her own show on the E! cable channel, The Chelsea Handler Show, which was followed in 2007 by Chelsea Lately, a late night talk show featuring Handler’s smart-aleck commentary on pop culture. Like her contemporary Sarah Silverman, Handler specializes in raunchy comedy of the I-can’t-believe-she-said-that variety. Besides her talk show, which ran on E! through 2014, Handler has done stand-up comedy tours, appeared in the web series In the Motherhood (2007, with Jenny McCarthy) and, in 2010, published her third book, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang.