Adam Carolla Curses Chelsea Handler Over the Hart Roast

Adam Carolla called Chelsea Handler a piece of shit on his podcast after she blasted Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe for jokes at Netflix’s Roast of Kevin Hart. She had already used that same stage, on May 10, to go after both men.

The special streamed live from the Kia Forum in Inglewood as the closer of Netflix Is a Joke Fest. Ten days later Handler told Deon Cole the night had been “ick” and “gross.” Carolla’s reply was blunt. It was not her roast.

Handler Used the Roast Rules on Gillis First

Gillis hosted the Kia Forum roast on May 10, a Netflix live taping that started at 5:00 p.m. Before he brought Handler out, he called her “a Zionist,” then tied that line to abortions and a 2010 dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s house. He named Prince Andrew and Woody Allen as other guests and told the room to look it up.

Handler, 51, did not wait for a later interview to punch back. She took the mic and treated Gillis and Hinchcliffe as her main targets, the way a roast is supposed to work.

HANDLER’S SHOTS ON THE DAIS

• On Gillis: She said Judaism and Zionism are different, then compared that split to Chinatown and Koreatown and needled the anti-Asian slurs that got him fired from Saturday Night Live before he ever aired, adding that he has “the complexion and physique of a steamed dumpling.”
• On Hinchcliffe: “Tony is what happens when women don’t have safe access to abortion care.” She also said he had “the face of a school shooter and the personality of someone who gets shot first.”
• On both: “Usually on Sunday nights, you just burn a cross on someone’s lawn, and tonight you get to roast a whole Black guy.” She closed the run by asking who was “keeping Joe Rogan’s balls warm.”

She also needled comics who had gone to a Saudi festival, asking if “tough-talking pussies only go to the Middle East for comedy festivals.” Pete Davidson, Jeff Ross, and Hart himself were among the people who went. Gillis and Hinchcliffe had already said they turned that booking down, so the line landed on a dais that was not even aligned on the trip.

The Lynching Joke She Could Not Abide

On May 20, on Cole’s Funny Knowing You podcast, Handler drew a line she had not drawn for her own KKK bit. She said she had heard from alleged former partners of Gillis and Hinchcliffe, then summed them up as “racist,” “bigots,” and “sexist,” and said they think they are “invincible.” Asked if she liked any of their roast jokes, she said no.

Gillis, 38, had joked that Hart is so short “you’d have to lynch him from a bonsai tree,” and he told the room the line took “three weeks of deliberation.” Handler’s verdict was absolute. “Jokes about lynching Black people, lynching is not a joke. That’s worse than rape.”

Hinchcliffe went at George Floyd while talking to Hart: “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.” He and Gillis also went after Sheryl Underwood, the former Talk co-host, over her husband Michael Sparkman, who died by suicide in 1990, three years into the marriage. Hinchcliffe, seated beside her, asked how Sparkman “last that long.” Gillis told the crowd he had called Underwood the day before and that she was “crazy about it.”

THE JOKES THAT SET OFF THE FIGHT

She said she could live with lazy jokes about her age and sex life because she is “rich,” “famous,” and “hot.” The racial material, she said, was “disgustingness” she had seen coming. “I knew it was gonna be a gross vibe that I would be able to elevate it no problem.” In her telling, Hart “deserved an elevated roast,” and she had shown up to lift a room she already expected to drag down.

Gillis later said on his own show that he “could have done without” the bonsai line, not as a moral apology but as a crowd read. He had run it in Nashville, Charlotte, Austin, and Boston, and those rooms told him to keep it. The Kia Forum, he said, was “the wrong crowd.”

Kevin Hart Refused to Disown the Set

Hart, whose name was on the marquee, would not join Handler’s veto. On The Breakfast Club he said the Floyd joke “wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” then added that people who watch a roast already know why racial humor is on the table. He pointed back to the Tom Brady roast and said this is what the format does.

Tony Hinchcliffe arguably had the best set or one of the best sets. Pete had a great set, too. Pete had a Charlie Kirk joke in it. Like, would I tell those jokes? No. But do I get why they’re being told? Yes.

Kevin Hart, on The Breakfast Club

Asked if Hinchcliffe crossed a line, Hart said, “I don’t expect less. I don’t expect more.” He asked to be pulled out of the argument. “I didn’t say it. If you are upset that the night went on, that’s a different conversation. It’s nothing I could do. It’s a production.”

Underwood’s position was messier than Handler’s recap. She laughed on camera, then hit Hinchcliffe from the podium: her husband “only died once,” while Hinchcliffe’s jokes “die every night.” She later said Gillis and Hinchcliffe called her first and “came with respect,” even if she did not know the exact wording. She also said people “should be upset” by the Floyd and bonsai lines, and she warned Hinchcliffe that he still had to “deal with the Floyd family.”

WHERE THE DAIS SPLIT

• Handler: The lynching and suicide bits were gross, and Hart should have gotten a cleaner night.
• Hart: Hinchcliffe’s set was among the best, and a roast audience knows the terms.
• Underwood: The husband jokes were flagged to her in advance; the Floyd and bonsai lines were the ones she said should sting.

Netflix, for its part, treated the show as a hit. The company said the roast drew 13.5 million views in the week of May 11 and finished No. 1 on its English TV list. That put it just behind the Brady roast Hart had helped put on two years earlier.

FIRST-WEEK NETFLIX VIEWS

Hart posted his thanks with a string of exclamation points and called it “ComedicRockStarShit.” The chart did not sort the jokes into allowed and forbidden piles. It counted plays.

What Carolla Told Handler About the Hart Roast

Carolla’s blast landed on May 26, after Handler’s podcast clip had already moved. He opened by calling her a piece of shit, then went at the idea that her taste was the test. The audience, he said, had already voted with its lungs, and “Her Highness” was not the person the night was built to please. In his own reaction clip, he kept returning to the same point: Hart’s name was on the show, not hers.

No one cares what you find to be funny. It’s a Kevin Hart roast. The audience was laughing their ass off, so they find it to be funny. We’re not there so her highness can be pleased by jokes. It’s not your roast. It’s Kevin Hart’s roast.

Adam Carolla, The Adam Carolla Show

He told her to “just shut up, tell the jokes or don’t,” and floated retirement as the other option if the format disgusted her. That blast sat inside a wider post-roast pile-on that Gillis and Hinchcliffe had already joined in their own voices.

Adam Carolla reacts to Chelsea Handler going off on Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane Gillis pic.twitter.com/9yDye2vMK0

— The Adam Carolla Show (@AdamCarollaShow) May 26, 2026

Carolla was not a man watching from a distant couch. About five days before the taping he had dinner with Jimmy Kimmel, his old Man Show partner, and Jeff Ross, the veteran roastmaster, who had six or seven pages of Hart-is-tiny jokes to try at the Comedy Store. Carolla offered a joke he handed Jeff Ross: Hart “burst onto the scene” after Michael Jackson dangled him off a balcony. Ross opened the Netflix special with it. The podcaster who later policed Handler’s policing had already slipped a gag into the same night.

From the Kill Tony Stage, a Slur

Gillis answered Handler with a shrug dressed as a press statement. “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.” The host of the roast treated her clip as a promo cycle and redirected traffic to a stadium date.

Hinchcliffe went lower and longer. On the May 25 Kill Tony taping he said news stories claiming Handler “lit him up” were false if you watched the tape, then called her “a bit of a cunt” and said “she just kept coming at me.” He claimed the teleprompter failed only during his set, which gave him room “to remind Chelsea Handler what she looks like.” He also said that when she kept coming he thought, “Oh, I’m gonna fuck this bitch up.”

He told his crowd it was the first time he had been “called a Nazi multiple times in just a few hours,” and he blamed “LA writers rooms” and “mentally ill liberals,” including the people he said wrote Handler’s material. He listed Black, Jewish, and Mexican players in his band, then said he is none of the slurs thrown at him. The Kill Tony room cheered the grievance. It was the same economy as Handler’s podcast: a roast clip, stretched into a week of content.

Handler Played the White Male Card on Spencer Pratt

Carolla tied the roast fight to a second clip. After the special, Handler posted a video aimed at Spencer Pratt, the former reality star running for Los Angeles mayor, and framed him as “a straight, white male former reality star that has no previous experience in government.” Pratt answered by circulating Gillis’s Epstein intro of Handler from the roast itself.

Carolla’s read was that she had skipped Pratt’s actual record and gone straight to the identity list. “He’s white. He’s male. He’s heterosexual. All the bad things. Who’s the racist here?” Then he turned it on her hair. “Stop saying white, white, white. You’re a blonde. You’re the whitest of them all and you’re skating by on your blonde hair.”

The Pratt fight and the roast fight used the same move. Handler made race and gender the frame. The men she targeted sent her own roast tape back.

Carolla Kept Swinging After the Star

On May 27, Carolla received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and used the speech to jab Handler again. Kimmel was around that ceremony as an old partner with opposite politics. The roast argument had already left the Kia Forum, left Cole’s studio, left Kill Tony, and landed on a sidewalk plaque.

THE MAY PILE-ON

1. May 10, 2026: Netflix streams the Roast of Kevin Hart live from the Kia Forum, with Gillis hosting and Handler, Hinchcliffe, Underwood, Davidson, and Ross on the dais.
2. May 20, 2026: Handler tells Deon Cole the Gillis and Hinchcliffe material was racist and “worse than rape”; Gillis answers with the Philadelphia stadium plug.
3. May 25, 2026: Hinchcliffe hits Handler with a slur on Kill Tony and says her writers missed.
4. May 26, 2026: Carolla calls her a piece of shit and says the audience, not “Her Highness,” is the judge; Hart, the same day, calls Hinchcliffe’s set one of the best and asks to be removed from the fight.
5. May 27, 2026: Carolla takes the same fight to his Walk of Fame speech.

Hart’s ask is the detail that sits under all of the later noise. He said the jokes were a production he booked, not a statement he needed to recant, and he asked the public to take his name out of the scolding. Handler still wanted an elevated roast after she had already done the un-elevated version. Carolla still wanted her to sit down. The special stayed on Netflix, and the clips kept paying all of them.