Chelsea Handler has made it abundantly clear that her talk show on Netflix isn't just more of the same. For one thing, she's really over the super-awkward celebrity interviews. And when she sat down with Variety at Sundance this weekend, she barely had to pause to come up with the "worst" celeb she's had to speak to on the air. "There's so many — Justin Bieber, maybe, because he was trying to flirt with me and it was so uncomfortable," she said. "That's his shtick. You feel like a child molester. I don't want to feel that way." Just in case you've forgotten just how young Bieber looked at age 16 — when he first started using that shtick on Handler — here's a fan-made edit of him on her show.
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"When you interview celebrities, they're so guarded so many times, and they can't reveal anything, and they can't have politics and they can't have opinions," Handler told Variety. "And so when you talk to real people who are opinionated, I always think that's interesting, whether I agree with their opinion or not."
Handler produced the four-part docuseries Chelsea Does on Netflix, which is all about those opinionated people. One of the topics she tackles in it is racism.
"Everyone's racist," she told Variety. "I wanted to do the thing on racism because I wanted to go at it lightly. I don't want to be so serious about everything, and political correctness is so overwrought...Even though it's such a serious, sad topic, let's go at it with a sense of humor."
In her recent interview with Refinery29, Handler explained that as a comedian, she finds humor a useful tool for tackling sensitive subjects. "[I]t's nice to be able to use that tool wisely, because you can get away with more as a comedian. Half the stuff I say, if another person said it, they would be raked over the coals."
Keep all that in mind, Bieber fans.