If you have sensitive ears or are easily offended, I don't recommend watching "The Roast of Kevin Hart" on Netflix. It wasn't polite in any regard, as roasts usually aren't, but this one was particularly savage.
I'll skip most of the roasters, but two, in particular, stood out, and not just because they were white. Tony Henchliffe and Shane Gillis stood out because they weren't scared to go further than many white comedians would normally dare to in that situation. Again, it wasn't clean by any measure. Some of the jokes would leave your jaw on the floor and even felt unusually mean, but people loved it because it actually felt like people were free to say what they wanted.
At one point, Gillis says Kevin Hart is so small they're going to have to lynch him from a bonsai tree, which got a laugh out of everyone. He even went after Chelsea Handler, and said she's gotten "scrapped more times than the grill at Benihana," a reference to her abortions.
Everyone apparently had a great time... except Handler.
She would later go on "Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You" podcast, where she would complain that Hinchcliffe and Gillis were all the usual social sins at the roast. They were sexist, racist, and bigoted, and their jokes weren't funny because racism can't be funny. Handler goes on to say that she knew they would say awful things, so she sought to "elevate" the show with her humor.
Oh, and it wouldn't be a Handler appearance without her talking about how she's "bangable."
Chelsea Handler lashes out at comedian Tony Hinchcliffe over a George Floyd joke at Kevin Hart's Netflix roast pic.twitter.com/Coq3EoZYuA
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 21, 2026
This was a pretty ridiculous take, as most of Handler's takes are, but this one was especially telling about Handler and her comedic style... or total lack thereof.
For starters, the issue wasn't that Gillis and Hinchcliffe weren't funny; it's that they offended Handler's sensibilities, which shouldn't be happening in the first place because Handler herself is (supposedly) a comedian. She should understand these were just jokes. Gillis wasn't actually going to try to lynch Hart. He wasn't saying lynching anyone was a good thing. It was an irreverent joke about Hart's skin color and height between friendly colleagues.
But naturally, Handler can't understand that because Handler belongs to a sect of "comedians" who aren't comedians, so much as political operatives. The point of jokes isn't to laugh, it's to tear down things they consider oppositional, and to reinforce or humanize their political ideas. Leftist comedians usually call this "punching up," and they frame it as making jokes about the powerful, but really it's just political activism with a grin.
One of the major points of comedy is to destroy sacred cows. Laughing at the naked emperor is a surefire way to make people realize that the thing they see as all-powerful and untouchable is actually kind of ridiculous. Comedy is healthy, and is one of the things that can equalize people better than any leftist political system claims to.
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Race relations in our country have been one of those things we couldn't make fun of for ages, particularly when it came to black people. That time is clearly coming to an end, and honestly, it's been better for everyone. It's been something of a pressure release valve, and I'd go so far as to say I've seen way more togetherness between races in places where they can make fun of each other openly.
The "Kill Tony" show is a really great example of this. People of every race, creed, sex, and ability come to the show to tell jokes, get roasted, and have fun.
But Handler sees all of this as problematic. It treats the things she sees as important, such as racial/social hierarchies, and treats abortion as sacred, as jokes. Something to laugh at or laugh at people about. This can't happen because this does her politics no favors.
This doesn't make Handler much of a comedian, then. Moreover, it kind of shows you how unfunny the Left actually is. There's no real laughter to be had because the laughter elicited has to come from a very specific kind of commentary with very specific targets.
