Comedy review: Chelsea Handler, ASB Theatre

Comedian Chelsea Handler.

How offensive can Chelsea Handler get? Chris Schulz braved the TV comedian's first Auckland show to find out.

Trust Chelsea Handler to take it too far.

Yes, the foul-mouthed comedian's first New Zealand show was always going to be a vulgar stand-up experience - that's what fans of her E! talk show Chelsea Lately know and love her for.

And right from her opening word - "F***!" - that's exactly what tonight proved to be, with Handler delivering puerile, ultra-personal stories about herself, her weird friends and work mates, and her overseas travels.

Along the way she delivered punch lines and photos about her experiences creating her new mock travel book, Uganda be Kidding Me - including plenty of snaps of her getting naked in Africa, and a ridiculously over-the-top and unnecessary poo joke that closed the show.

Thankfully, this wasn't just a one-hour slideshow, or an ad for the best-selling author's latest work. Handler is a master entertainer, loves playing up to an audience and shocking them into stitches, and she treats swearing like a work of art.

She certainly lived up to her nickname as the "Queen of Mean", channeling the spirit of Joan Rivers into hilariously filthy tales about stuffing her co-worker Chuy Bravo into a plane's overhead compartment locker, or chastising her personal assistant for failing to cater to her drunken demands to book a private plane for her dogs.

If you're easily prone to offense, Handler's show isn't for you. The 39-year-old takes particular delight in crossing racial boundaries, early on asking the Kiwi crowd if there were "any black people in the house tonight - full blacks, not 50-50".

She later described Eskimos as "small Asians with a touch of the downs".

But it was stories about her friends that saw Handler really excel: her efforts to get her sex-starved make-up artist a date with an outlandish online dating profile on a fisherman's website was one of the night's highlights, as were digs at her gay room mate - which came with camp, gun-toting safari snaps.

It was all as to be expected - filthy, slightly offensive, often controversial and funny in the way that you're disgusted at yourself for laughing at jokes that you really shouldn't be laughing at.

But then Handler took the night up a notch, walking up to the line, straddling it for a while, then jumping in a bulldozer and ploughing right over it.

She did it by displaying a photo of a male geriatric threesome in all of its pornographic, R18 glory up on the venue's big screen for so long some viewers buried their heads in their hands, begging for it to disappear.

That was the punch line to a joke about her dad sending her a dick-pic from his all-male care facility, and the cheeky expression on her face as she watched her audience react in horror showed exactly why Handler's stuck around in showbiz for so long: she's enjoying this as much as her fans are. Long may the Queen of Mean reign.

Chelsea Handler
Where: ASB Theatre, Auckland
When: Saturday, November 29

* What did you think of the show? Post your comments below.

- nzherald.co.nz