Highlights
- Hinchcliffe called Handler the c-word on his “Kill Tony” podcast after she blasted his roast jokes.
- Handler branded him a “racist,” “bigot,” and “sexist” over his Kevin Hart roast material.
- The George Floyd joke at the Netflix roast drew condemnation from the Floyd family and sparked wider backlash.
The gloves — and apparently any semblance of civility — are completely off.
Tony Hinchcliffe is firing back at Chelsea Handler after she ripped him as a racist hack for telling a George Floyd joke at the Kevin Hart roast, and he’s calling her the c-word.
Hinchcliffe took to his live podcast, Kill Tony, to address reports that Handler had “lit him up” at Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart — a characterization he flatly rejected.
“There’s news articles that say that I got lit up by Chelsea Handler, which is very, very funny, because that’s not what happened at all,” he said. “You can’t believe anything you see or read on the news anymore. You have to actually watch the thing for yourself. She was a bit of a c-nt, I’ll tell you that.”
He wasn’t done there.
“The writers just didn’t do her any justice. But then the teleprompter, fun fact, the teleprompter only went down during my set. And it gave me a lot of opportunity to remind Chelsea Handler what she looks like and where her life is, because she had it coming.”
Tony also claimed Handler got a lot of her facts wrong when trying to make jokes at his expense, and says she didn’t even write the material she read off the teleprompter at the roast. His podcast rant quickly turned into a full-blown mini roast of Handler, with Hinchcliffe firing shots at her career, age, and physical appearance.
He also unloaded on the critics who’ve branded him a racist, labeling them “mentally ill liberals.” “I got called a Nazi, gay, a racist over and over again,” Hinchcliffe said. “I’m none of those three things, a little fun fact.”
Handler’s Broadside
Handler set the feud in motion last week when she appeared on the Funny Knowing You podcast with Deon Cole and unleashed on both Hinchcliffe and fellow comedian Shane Gillis.
“It’s just everything we know, that they’re racist, that they’re bigots, they’re sexist,” Handler told Cole.
When Cole pressed her on whether she found any of their jokes funny, Handler was blunt: “No. I mean, it was ick. It was gross.”
She specifically called out Gillis’ lynching joke — “Kevin is so short, you’d have to lynch him from a bonsai tree” — saying, “I don’t find those jokes to be funny. Lynching Black people is not a joke. That’s worse than rape.”
Handler also criticized Hinchcliffe’s bit aimed at Sheryl Underwood, where he brought up her late husband Michael Sparkman‘s suicide. “Them making fun of Sheryl Underwood’s dead husband who committed suicide is gross,” she said. “There was so much disgustingness.”
At the roast itself, Handler’s set had been squarely aimed at Hinchcliffe. She hit him on his affinity for Joe Rogan — “Tony, quick question: if you’re here tonight, who’s keeping Joe Rogan’s balls warm in their mouth?” — and said he “must be using Crest White Supremacist Strips” on his whitened teeth, referencing his condemned joke calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in 2024.
The George Floyd Flashpoint
The joke that ignited the entire firestorm came during Hinchcliffe’s set at the Netflix special itself.
At the roast, Hinchcliffe told Hart, 46, “The Black community is so proud of you… right now George Floyd is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.”
The Floyd family reacted immediately, saying they were “baffled and disgusted” and that the comedian’s fixation on the tragedy was “sad for culture.” They added that repeated jokes about the victim of a racially charged murder amounted to bullying toward his 12-year-old daughter.
Hart, who also served as executive producer of the special, has refused to edit out the controversial comments — even as he faces public scrutiny, given that he attended Floyd’s funeral in 2020.
Nikki Glaser Weighs In — Carefully
Comedian Nikki Glaser, who turned down a spot at the roast, told Entertainment Tonight she was glad she’d been watching from the sidelines rather than participating. She stopped short of naming names, however. “I’m going to keep my opinions to myself and just keep talking about them in my group chats with my other comedian friends about what we think about it,” she said.
Behind the scenes, Glaser reportedly called Hinchcliffe out for making a random racist joke without making it “palatable.”
Gillis Keeps It Breezy
Shane Gillis, for his part, brushed off Handler’s criticism with characteristic nonchalance. His rep shared a statement reading, “This is a big moment for Chelsea. I am glad she’s capitalizing. Good for her. We’re all rooting for her. Anyway come see me July 17 at the football stadium in Philly.”
Whether Netflix or Hart will face any additional fallout over the special remains to be seen. What’s clear is that the controversy surrounding The Roast of Kevin Hart has no intention of dying down anytime soon — and neither does Tony Hinchcliffe.
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