Chelsea Handler went nuclear on the Netflix roast stage and then took it even further during a podcast appearance, calling out Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe for crossing every line that exists.
She didn’t hold back when she appeared on Deon Cole’s Funny Knowing You podcast, where she made it crystal clear what she thought about their material.
“I knew enough about Tony and Shane, they’re racists, they’re bigots, they’re sexist,” Handler said without any filter whatsoever. “I don’t find those jokes funny. Lynching Black people is not a joke. It’s worse than rape.”
The roast itself became a minefield of offensive content, far beyond what most people expected from a Netflix special.
Hinchcliffe’s George Floyd joke landed like a bomb, with him saying, “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.”
That line didn’t just upset people online; it triggered an official response from George Floyd’s family. Travis Cains, a spokesperson for the Gianna and George Floyd Foundation, called Hinchcliffe a “racist comedian” and expressed the family’s outrage at how their loved one’s death was weaponized for laughs.
Comedian Lil Rel Howery also blasted the George Floyd joke as “disgusting,” joining the chorus of voices pushing back against what went down that night.
Handler herself fired back during her own set, hurling blistering insults directly at both comedians, making it clear she wasn’t going to let their material slide without consequences.
She told Hinchcliffe he had “the face of a school shooter and the personality of someone who gets shot first,” and she went after Gillis for his history of anti-Asian slurs that got him fired from “Saturday Night Live” years ago.
Kevin Hart defended Hinchcliffe afterward, saying the comedian “understood the assignment” and was “relentless as he always is, but funny.”
That defense didn’t sit well with people who saw the roast as crossing into territory that shouldn’t be comedy material at all.
The backlash extended beyond just the George Floyd joke, with critics pointing out that white comedians had gotten too comfortable making racist jokes without any real punchline beyond the offense itself.
“Everybody laughing until it’s their family member that gets murdered, then it ain’t funny,” said former NBA star Stephen Jackson, who was a close friend of George Floyd.