Chelsea Handler was asked to stop drinking for 30 days. It served her new tour well.
Chelsea Handler’s current standup-comedy tour might be called “Vaccinated and Horny” — a jokey nod to her state of being as the world heads for the other side of the pandemic.
But when she jumps on the phone to discuss it, two other adjectives more fittingly sum her up: caffeinated and busy.
“I’ve been up since 5 a.m., so so many things have transpired already,” says the 46-year-old comedian/author/podcaster. “I worked out twice. ... First I got on the Peloton, and then I went over to my trainer Ben Bruno’s, and I brought my boyfriend over there so he could start training, too. ... We got coffee at Starbucks. ...
“It’s just been a jam-packed morning. And then I have to record some podcasts, two episodes of my podcast. One with Dax Shepard and one with Sean Hayes.”
This, by the way, is technically an off day from the aforementioned 40-city tour, which launched in September and comes to Charlotte’s Ovens Auditorium on Dec. 16, before calling it a year two nights later in Asheville.
Handler, calling from a home she’s renting in the Los Angeles area, spoke to the Observer this week about everything from how abstaining from alcohol (on a temporary basis) helped her hone her new routine to one-upping her fellow comedian/new boyfriend Jo Koy’s tour bus. She also talks about the now-legendary process she used to screen potential, um, hookup partners during the pandemic.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Q. How’s the tour? Are you sick of touring yet?
No, not at all. I’m loving it. I mean, it’s an exhausting schedule, obviously, traveling every day. But it’s just been awesome bringing so many people together. For so many people it’s their first time being in large audiences again, and it’s reminding people about togetherness and laughter and all that good stuff. It’s just good vibes everywhere.
Q. And this is maybe a stupid question, but how are you getting from city to city. Are you on a bus, or are you just —
Sometimes we bus. Sometimes we plane. It depends. Sometimes we’ll drive in a car if it’s less than two hours, we’ll take an SUV that’ll just transport us. It’s not like I have a huge crew coming with me. Sometimes we take a plane, if it’s longer. Then if it’s a four- or five-hour drive, we do a bus. So each leg, each weekend, is different.
But yeah, I’ve had a bus on some weekends, which has been very, very funny. I never ever pictured myself having a tour bus, but Jo Koy introduced me to tour buses and now I’m hooked.
Q. Is he on the road with you?
No. He’s on his own tour. And he’s got a bus everywhere he goes. So he’s always on a tour bus. We did some shows together in Florida, ’cause he had the week off and I was doing my dates in Florida. But not typically, we’re not together on the road.
Q. Who’s got the cooler bus?
I do. I always have the cooler everything.
Q. What’s on your bus that’s so cool?
It’s just more modern. It’s a woman running my tour, and a man running his. So there’s a big difference about comfort level.
He got on my bus and he’s like, “Oh, this is such (expletive). Every time you do something, it’s so much nicer than what I have.” I was like, “Well, it’s also a little white privilege. You know, we’ve been exposed to so many different forms of luxury already. We’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I have to be as (expletive) comfortable as possible.’” (Jo Koy is half-white, and half-Filipino.)
Q. I read a recent interview you did with the Orlando Weekly where you said, of touring now: “There’s a lot of sleeping, not as much drinking as there used to be.” (Handler has admitted to “drinking excessively” in the past but has talked publicly about cutting back in recent years.)
Oh, yeah, well, I mean, it used to be I would be just running on fuel — going from one city to the next and just doing whatever and then landing back in LA and doing my (TV) show, and you were just running on steam. So now, it’s a much different game. It’s a wellness game.
You have to basically take care of yourself all day long in order to perform at a different level, and respect the fact that all these people are paying money to see you perform.
Q. I also heard you recently did an “alcohol cleanse.” How did that go?
Somebody had called in to my podcast and wanted to do an alcohol cleanse, and I just did it in solidarity. I also did a 30-day weed cleanse earlier in the year — another person had called in to my podcast wanting to do a weed cleanse, because they had no tolerance for weed anymore, so I did it with them. Then I did this 30-day alcohol cleanse.
I basically lost two months of my year just in support of other people. I’m not doing that anymore.
Q. Which cleanse was harder?
I guess the no-alcohol. Because I was in New York City for a week while I was doing that, and that was a bit tough. To be in New York, I like to go to lunches, have a margarita. So that was a little bit more challenging. But neither were really that hard. It’s not that hard to do. After you get past the first couple days, you’re like, “OK, this feels good.”
It doesn’t feel good enough to do forever, but it wasn’t too challenging. I mean, I have to find something a little bit more challenging to really rock me.
Q. Right. But you feel — I’ve never done a 30-day cleanse, but if you go a week without drinking, you do feel like — I don’t know if healthier’s the right word, but —
Well, you have more mental clarity I think. And you’re less bloated. You don’t have that puffiness that everyone has when they drink. Which people don’t think that they have. But if you’ve never quit drinking for 10 days, you don’t really know what your face looks like. Because it looks a lot different when you take alcohol out of the equation for an extended period of time.
But yeah, it wasn’t like I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing!” I was just like, “Yeah, I feel good.” And I was starting my stand-up tour, so it was important for me — for memorization of my new hour that will turn into a special — to make sure I had mental clarity and was able to focus and not get distracted.
Once you get it engineered in, and you have it down, then you can go in and have a little fun, and you can have a drink once in awhile, and get a little bit more loosey-goosey. But for the purposes of beginning my tour, it was kind of the perfect time to do that cleanse.
Q. So you feel like it had a positive impact on your performance, and maybe on the way you felt going into a performance?
Yeah. I had never done that before. I had never removed every single crutch. You know, alcohol, pot, everything. Sometimes performers just — you get in a mindset where you’re like, “Oh, I’ll have a cocktail before I go onstage.” And then that becomes a crutch.
So removing all of that, it’s good psychology for yourself, to know that you can handle it. To push through your nerves without any of that help is important as a performer. For me, it was good on that level. I felt like, “Oh, OK, you’re really challenging yourself, and you’re making yourself sharper, smarter, and getting this new hour down.”
Q. So what’s somebody gonna ask you to give up for 30 days next?
I don’t know. Somebody suggested my housekeeper, Mabel. I was like, “Wow, that actually would be really challenging.” Because I can’t do anything for myself. I mean, she helps me pack, she helps me do everything. And my dogs have no respect for me. They only care about her. So if I didn’t have her for 30 days, that’d be very challenging for me, as sad as that is to say.
Q. Does Jo Koy clean?
Yeah, he does. He makes the bed every morning. It’s pretty cute. And then Mabel comes in and just remakes it for him.
Q. So getting back to the tour, coming back from the pandemic, what’s the biggest difference you notice between what doing live shows was like quote-unquote before, and what doing them now is like?
Well, there’s just a feeling of more connectedness with everything. Everybody’s more connected because nobody’s taking it for granted anymore because of everything we’ve been through. And everyone wants to laugh and joke about it, because if we don’t, it’s too depressing a topic to talk about.
So we have to make fun of the fact that we were all cleaning our food with Windex — you know, giving ourselves cancer but avoiding COVID. Or the fact that I had rapid COVID tests at my home in order to have sex with strangers. That’s what COVID pushed me to do.
We all kind of had ridiculous behavior that we participated in, no matter who you are, and it’s important to be able to laugh at that. So many people lost people, so many people suffered. So yeah, I like to point the finger at myself. It’s very easy to make fun of myself.
Q. So making guys take COVID tests in your backyard, that really happened?
Oh yeah, I had to. I had to just take things into my own hands. I would invite men over in staggered call times, knowing full well that not all of them were gonna work out. I’d have someone come at 7, I’d have someone come at 9, someone at 10:30, and basically I would just give them a nasal swab when they got to my house, and it took about 30 minutes to run the diagnostics for the test.
Within that 30 minutes, if they said anything annoying, or I saw a pinky ring, I would just come back out and say, “You have COVID.”
Q. But they don’t just walk up and you give them a nasal swab, there’s a conversation that goes on before that. And I imagine those conversations were somewhat awkward, right? I mean, how do you present that to them?
Easily. It’s like, “Hey, do you wanna come over here? Do you wanna potentially hook up? You’re gonna need to take a COVID test.” There’s no challenge to that whatsoever. I have a very easy time being direct.
Q. As far as the material in your current tour in general, is it heavily focused on COVID?
No, no. It’s not mainly about COVID. It starts out about COVID, and it’s a jumping-off point, but it’s mainly about where we are in society and in our lives and just the idiocy of everybody.
And I talk a lot about my own love story. My giving up on men, and then the renewing of men from Jo Koy. He’s the perfect example of a guy that is turned on — and not emasculated by — a woman with confidence and a woman with strength.
I also tell a lot of silly stories from my childhood. It’s very self-reflective. It’s self-deprecating.
But mainly it’s kind of an anthem for women, a call for women not to ever lose faith, or ever settle for anything less than what you think you deserve.
And not just for women, but for men. For everybody at my shows, you know, to know that when you don’t settle, you get what you deserve. And if you expect goodness, and you want a certain standard and level of things in your life, when you say no to things that are less than that, you are gonna get what you deserve. You are gonna get better.
It’s about believing in yourself.
For details and a complete list of “Vaccinated and Horny” tour dates, visit chelseahandler.com.
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
