Chelsea Handler took aim at Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe on Sunday night at Netflix’s roast for Kevin Hart, turning the room’s two most combustible comics into her main targets. Gillis, who hosted the event, took most of the heat in stride. Hinchcliffe did not.
Handler opened her attacks by calling Gillis a Zionist, prompting her own line that Judaism and Zionism are two different things. She then joked, “Just like how Chinatown and Koreatown are two different things, but your favorite slur works in both places,” before adding, “Shane has been accused of being anti-Asian,” and, “Which is ironic given that he has the complexion and physique of a steamed dumpling.”
The setup mattered because Gillis was not just any roast host. He was fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 after homophobic and racist slurs he made on a podcast in 2018 were unearthed, a history that made him an obvious target for a roast built on old bruises and public memory. By putting him in the center of the show, Netflix leaned straight into that baggage instead of trying to soften it.
Handler then shifted to Hinchcliffe, who had already drawn criticism shortly before the 2024 presidential election for a racist joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” at a rally for Donald Trump. She hit him with, “Tony is what happens when women don’t have safe access to abortion care,” and followed with, “Tony and Shane both live in Texas where abortion is illegal, but on the upside, if you see one of them doing comedy, there’s a pretty good chance your uterus will start dry-heaving on its own.”
She saved some of her sharpest lines for his appearance. “I didn’t know veneers came in deli mustard yellow,” she said, then added, “You must be using Crest White Supremacist Strips.” Gillis was pretty good-humored about her jabs, but Hinchcliffe looked pretty sour as the set went on. He laughed at the veneers line, then seemed not to like the next joke.
The exchange showed why the roast format still works when the crowd is willing to let it cut deep: it turns controversy into the currency of the night. For Gillis, whose 2019 firing still shadows his rise, the event made that old scandal part of the joke. For Hinchcliffe, it replayed a more recent one that had already pushed him into the center of another political and cultural fight. Handler’s set made clear that neither man was going to be let into the room without carrying those histories with him.
What comes next is less about whether either comic can shrug off a roast than whether the backlash around both men keeps following them after the microphones are off. Sunday night showed that the audience is no longer just laughing at the jokes. It is also laughing at the record.
