14 DAY TRIAL // In March this year, Chelsea Handler announced that she would not return to host Chelsea Lately on E! once the year was over and, the very next day, she was explaining her decision by trashing her soon-to-be-former employers and the celebrity guests she had on. That was a very unprofessional thing of her to say, Joan Rivers believes.
Both Joan and Chelsea are now under contract with the network, and in a new interview with the Huffington Post (video is available at the link) to promote her new book “Diary of a Mad Diva,” Joan shakes a finger at her younger colleague for the way she handled this situation.
She says that everyone at E! is “lovely” and Chelsea could have shown a bit more professionalism in announcing her departure, in the sense that she could have done it without saying all she’d done so far had been garbage – let alone when her next job will be just like this one, consisting of interviewing celebrities.
For those who don’t know the explanation Handler offered for the departure, here’s how it went down: E! confirmed Chelsea Lately would end, and in a following interview, she said she left of her own will because she’d grown sick and tired of interviewing the Justin Biebers of the world.
She made it sound as if interviewing celebs was creatively crippling to her. Ironically, her next job on Netflix will see her do just that.
People tend to hate on Joan because they find her sense of humor verging on too crass to be funny, especially when she starts namedropping like there’s no tomorrow. They may be right (they may as well be wrong, who are we to say), but there’s no denying that, this time, Joan actually makes a solid argument.
Moreover, she does it without coming across as hateful, vengeful, or crazy.
“She wasn’t fired. The numbers — allegedly, I don’t need to get into a [competition] — were going way down, down, down, so I don’t think there was renewal talk,” Rivers says. “I thought she left badly.”
She makes sure to stress she holds no grudge against Handler (her exact words are that she’s too dumb to hold one), but that Chelsea did hate her.
“She came out saying things like, ‘I’m the first woman ever to do a late-night show.’ She did this one day, and I followed her on the dais and I said, ‘I guess everyone’s forgotten the [Johnny] Carson show.’ She never spoke to me again,” the aging comedienne explains.
That wasn’t the last time Rivers tried to talk some sense into her younger colleague, either. Some time later, they both happened to be at the same party, and Joan approached her because she saw the PR potential of this.
“I went to her, I was at a party, I said, ‘Let’s take a picture together because it’ll make the papers.’ She walked away. I thought, ‘Oh, you stupid girl.’ It’s a small business, we should all be friends,” she explains.
Do we agree Joan Rivers deserves a slow clap right now?