User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Horrible. Chelsea Lately is a great show, and Chelsea Handler a talented comedian. But this book is
bad. A colossal disappointment. The whole crass “shock value” thing wears thin really quickly. I might have laughed a
couple of times, but not enough to warrant even a second star.
Rating: really liked it
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
I DID IT! I DID IT! I DID A DNF!!!! Mind you, it was an audiobook of a physical book I had already read, but hey I had to start somewhere, right? So now you might be wondering how in the eff am I managing to 1 Star something I 4 Starred in the past. Welllllll, lemme tell ya . . . . .
Chelsea Handler has a voice that I want to punch right in the throat. I convinced myself I could get past it and the funny would outweigh the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard reaction I have had to her speaking in the past, but it was not meant to be. In fact, her delivery makes this book decidedly UNFUNNY – even when I knew the material had me literally LOLing the first time around. Lesson learned and any future Handler endeavors by me will be strictly via print.
Rating: really liked it
I watch a lot of American (or American based) hosts of late night shows on You Tube. I'm not a big fan of Jimmy Kimmel, but the title of
this book made me think I would enjoy Chelsea as a guest host.
Which I did.
Her take no prisoners style of delivery on the show made me a fan, & wish Chelsea would get her own talk show again.
I don't know if Chelsea's style works for me so well in print, although I certainly laughed out loud quite a few times.
How they grow grapes in a part of town that is mostly populated by gangs and high-rises is beyond me, but when alcohol is involved, I rarely ask questions.
As a tip, I think would have been a happier person if I hadn't read Chapter 8. I'm still trying to find a way to bleach it from my brain.
You have been warned.
https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...
Rating: really liked it
Cutting edge, funny sexy stories. Having seen Chelsea doing stand up and on Girls Behaving Badly, I was anxious to see how her wicked sarcastic wit would translate into text. It's fantastic! A seriously gifted writer, who combines funny and raunchy better than any woman.
I mean wild, hilarious and uninhibited story telling. And it's not just the sheer ridiculous situations she encounters. She reflects about her mindless journeys and the meaning of life in such an amusing, self-deprecating cynical manner. It’s filled with funny anecdotes. She just has that trashy comedienne's gift of saying everything we think about but are afraid to say. And she manages to share absolutely horrifying situations and somehow make them hysterical!
There are some hilarious and uncomfortable family situations. Her father was quite the provider of wisdom, selling used junkyard cars out of their front yard, while making inappropriate sexual innuendos towards his daughters.
She shares some really funny embarrassing youth debacles and misadventures, and of course her bizarre sexual encounters with some serious screw ups. My favorite of Chelsea's embarrassing re-collections: her preposterous fake celebrity elementary school tale, a LOL birthday party for a friendless girl full of re-gifting, pretending to be honeymooning with her father in order to upgrade to first class. The Mini-Me and Prison Break chapters are just classics. Frankly if she wasn't successful, she may have ended up a basket case.
If you are sensitive or quick to take offense, I would pass on this one. If you have a repressed wild side, you'll dive in headfirst and relish her antics and live vicariously through them. Also, if you like reading funny out of control drinking and sex stories, I'm half-way through Chelsea's other book ...
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands and it's great.
I also recommend reading the guy’s version of this book. Wild steamy Penthouse stories, VIP partying, and it's even funnier than Chelsea's stuff.
High Heels and Dirty Deals - Globetrotting Tales of Debauchery from a Binge-drinking Nymphomaniac
Rating: really liked it
This sort of book and the positive outpouring for it make me really feel like I must have missed the boat somewhere in the last couple decades of culture or something. Maybe it is that I have never seen Handler's stand-up and came to this book expecting something a little bit different. Perhaps Handler's shtick is that she is merely making a tongue-in-cheek imitation of the cliche "mean girl" that we all know from our high school days. But without being let in on the charade, I found connecting with Handler throughout the book to be basically impossible. The humor mostly seems to consist of criticizing everyone in her family, her circle of friends, and anyone else she meets in her life - most typically in a way that falls a tad short of catty, landing mostly in the realm of bitchy.
Admittedly, Handler does trot out a few story moments that provoked grins and the occasional laugh. However, the pacing and 'convenience' of most stories stretched my credulity well beyond my suspended disbelief - typically just making me feel bad for her parents/exes/waiter/friends or whomever that she happened to be interacting with at the moment in the story. Its clear that her escapades are wildly fabricated in places where the truth might have been more banal or required even a fleeting moment of self-reflection. Furthermore, despite all of the tweaking, many of the stories were pretty boring, just tossing in blunt comments and sailor-speak doesn't turn a dull day out into comedic gold.
I had heard this book likened to some of Sedaris' essays, but find that the comparison to be wildly off-target. Sedaris brings a sort of quiet thoughtfulness to his humor, and is most frequently the target of his own jokes. Handler, instead, brings a sort of crass entitlement to her judgments, too good for even those she is telling her story to.
Rating: really liked it
Admittedly, I don't usually read books like this, but found
Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea to be an overall entertaining collection. The first four essays were, far and away, the 'best' in the collection. Until reading this book, I had no familiarity with Handler.
Totally underwhelming and inconsistently hilarious. Admittedly, the parts that were funny really were fantastic. However, Chelsea Handler glosses over and re-arranges life events in order to align them
just so - and thusly make whatever anecdote she's recounting work like one of her performance jokes.
Everything works just a little
too well for these to be legitimate essays. Rather, the book reads like an ongoing stand-up routine with more detail added.
Overall, it's a good effort: Handler isn't the best writer (and is occasionally downright dismal), but her stories are generally amusing.
Rating: really liked it
Ah Chelsea, Hilarious. Read this on the plane ride back from atlanta. She never disappoints and I'm certain i annoyed rows 18 and 20 of Airtran Flight 176, and possibly rows 17 and 21 at certain points in the book with my laughter. Would recommend it to anyone :)
Rating: really liked it
Buhwahahaha! This woman is easily the funniest woman in the entertainment industry. Yes, she's rude and crude, and definitely not for the prude. But I just can't help it. I love her. She brings out the evil maniacal laugh in me, if case you didn't already notice.
Since her other book is entitled "My Horizontal Life : A Collection of One-Night Stands", you can be fairly certain this book will also include sexual content as well as a lot of adult language. So if those make you uncomfortable, don't read this. At least not while others of a prudish nature are around.
She does have a deeply dark sense of humor. It seems to be all in good fun, though not necessarily good taste. I like to believe she's a softie at heart, just with a hard exterior. Nevertheless, she's entertaining to say the least.
I really recommend listening to the audio book. A sheet of paper just cannot capture the brilliance of her wit and sarcasm. Her voice can be slightly overwhelming at times, but if your feeling down, her stories will bring you, if nothing else, hilarity.
What are you going to do tonight, Chelsea Handler? Same thing she does every night - Try to take over the world. The entertainment world at least. *Evil laugh* For those of you lucky enough to afford cable television (I resort to the Internet, it's cheaper), her show is just as disturbing and just as funny.
Rating: really liked it
3 stars for me. I listened to this on audio and like my GR friend Kelly stated, Chelsea's voice can be a bit much. Also, did all of these things truly happen? Some of them seem a bit over the top and maybe a bit embellished to make a better story?!? I think calling her dad "bitch tits" is bad. It just sounds stupid to me.
There were quite a few times when I laughed out loud though. I am certainly not opposed to reading more of her stories. I used to watch her show on tv and I wonder if any of her girlfriends in the book were some of the comics on the show. It never stated if any names were changed. I also want to look up on You Tube the Girls Behaving Badly show and see if I can watch the scenes with Kimmy :))
Rating: really liked it
Crude and lewd but hilarious. Chelsea Handler is like Dennis Miller. Very funny...not for the faint of heart.
Rating: really liked it
Chelsea Handler's uninhibited storytelling and vulgar sense of humor make for a fun read. She has a gift for storytelling that will keep you laughing through each unbelievable and sometimes embarrassing real-life journey. This book is full of good, inappropriate fun. If you offend easily, you probably should not read it. Otherwise, have a good laugh!
Rating: really liked it
Are you there Vodka? It’s Me Chelsea
Everything about this book is clever, starting with the title. To any Judy Blume fan, the parody is obvious, but even the less-informed reader (to whom I will now impart the title of Blume’s novel,
Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret) would find this title an apt one.
Are you there Vodka? chronicles Chelsea Handler’s sexual antics across all realms, from weddings, to summer flings, to family vacations, and while the men (and midgets…) vary widely, one factor remains constant: her drink of choice, vodka.
Handler’s writing is self-mocking, but in a comically arrogant sort of way. Her manner reminds me of the way men boast to one another in such hyperbolic terms that each man knows the other cannot be serious and probably, in fact, believe the exact opposite about themselves, compared to what they are saying. Still, their claims become increasingly more broad and bombastic, as if needing to declare, “yes I did!” and “yes I am!”
Dry humor is the saving grace of this sort of comedic writing, because without it, Handler’s tales would come off as absurd and callous. Readers would feel inclined to chastise her reprehensible behavior, because superficially, it truly is the way mothers most fear their daughters will act in their teens and twenties and even early thirties. Instead, Handler is witty and self-mocking enough to make you spend most of the book wondering how much of each story is true and how much she is over exaggerating for effect. This guessing game turns into the compounding “oh my god, no she didn’t!” reaction you experience when your girlfriend tells you about “what a wild weekend she had.” Except according to this book, Handler doesn’t have wild weekends; she has a wild life.
Blume fans, don’t try this book unless you transitioned to at least the level of the Sweet Valley Twins series in later adolescence. Otherwise, you may suffer from painful finger-wagging and irrepressible groaning.
Bridget Jones’s Diary fans, read on. And try Handler’s My Horizontal Life, too.
Those in between…read at your own risk. If you believe you may harbor puritan strains deep in your heart, I will warn you that you may not find Handler’s humor funny. But if you have a repressed wild side, following Handler’s antics is one of the best ways to live vicariously.
Rating: really liked it
What was I thinking when I put this book on my list of audios that I wanted my audioflix service to send me? Oh well, give it a try, I thought, as I slid the first disk into the proper slot in the minivan. Well, I'm glad that I still have my lightening reflexes and battle tested driving skills because I was careening down the interstate laughing out loud at this book while going 80 miles per hour (and you thought that driving while talking on the telephone was dangerous). Chelsea Handler picks stories from her family, relationships, childhood, and career for this group of hysterical essays. The best part was that she read this book so I didn't even have to imagine hearing the stories in her voice. Now a word of caution: if you have never seen her television show, Chelsea Handler Lately, on the Comedy Channel, please watch it a time a or two before reading or listening to this book. On a scale of 1 to 10, she can hit a 12 on language and references to sex, drinking, and recreational drugs. But, apparently, this didn't faze a woman of my quality. Now I'm trying to decide if I want to risk reading My Horizontal Life--a series of essays about her one-night stands in her youth. Doesn't she know that we are still trying to pretend to our parents that our one-night stands never happened? But, if you like ribald humor, and I do, I recommend this book to you. Except Hope, please don't read this. I have WAY too much respect for you to subject you to this book. It's bad enough that you have to put up with me on a daily basis. Oh, and Leslie, don't read this. I can just see you getting that look on your face that I so enjoy when I speak or act inappropriately.
Rating: really liked it
This woman deserves the nobel prize. It's just not fair that we all don't have the talent and intelligence to make everyone laugh this hard for 2 hours straight. The world would be a better place. I couldn't put it down. My favorite story was her midget fetish- oh wait sorry, "healthy obsession". Dude that's just so far over the line that she erased the line.
Rating: really liked it
This book was just as much fun as Handler's first but possibly darker. Not that she got meaner or grosser but in this book I was often wondering, since for the most part, Handler does seem to actually wish to not overtly hurt anyone's feelings, how obvious it was to the people discussed that they were subjects. Some of them seemed to deserve it but nonetheless, this newer book seemed meaner. Handler has fantastic stories- I don't care if she has made them all up. I think her books are being marketed incorrectly- they look so trashy, especially this second one when in fact they don't read trashy. Not that Handler does not tell stories that reveal a wildness but they are good enough to not be marketed as trash. They stand well on their own. Without her picture on the cover...
