It was a rare and opportune moment to have a woman hosting a network late-night talk show. As previously scheduled, comedian Chelsea Handler began her week of shows filling in for Jimmy Kimmel just a few days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“I’ll be here all week long,” Handler said at the top of her monologue. “Or at least until Republicans make it illegal for women to talk.”
She then joked that Kimmel is currently on vacation “doing whatever the fuck he wants with his body.” And then, “At this point, I’d probably have more rights if my vagina was an AR-15.”
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Overall, Handler took the opportunity to tell numerous jokes that never could have been made by the show’s regular host, including one about women deleting period-tracking apps from their photos. “Because if they get an abortion, they’re worried law enforcement might use the data to track and prosecute them,” she explained. “I also deleted my menstruation app, but mostly because I’m on the eve of menopause.”
The court decision, Handler said, has made her a “very strong advocate of the pull-out method,” which she described as “when you pull Clarence Thomas out of the Supreme Court.”
“I was thinking to myself, who would ever marry a pig like Clarence Thomas,” she added, before pointing to Ginni Thomas’ insurrectionist tendencies. “That’s right, she was working behind the scenes to overturn a democratic election. Isn’t it so beautiful when two disgusting and awful people find each other? They are the ultimate abuse-of-power couple.”
The whole thing is “especially upsetting,” Handler said, when you realize that three of the six justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by a former president with a “over a dozen sexual assault allegations, who lost the popular vote twice, who was impeached twice, and attempted a coup because he’s a little, fat, big baby loser.”
Handler also sounded off on the Republicans who still claim to be “pro-life” despite doing everything they can to make life harder for the same kids they claim they want to “save” by outlawing abortion.
“Universal health care, that’s pro-life,” she said. “Restricting guns, that’s pro-life. Fighting climate change, that’s also pro-life. Listening to doctors during a pandemic, also pro-life. Not forcing women to give birth like livestock. But your party opposes all of those things. Calling Republicans pro-life is like calling O.J. Simpson pro-wife.”
And Handler made sure viewers knew she was speaking from experience as someone who had three abortions while still high school. “And if that sounds too extreme, let’s pretend I had two,” she joked.
“Because here’s the thing, this planet is a much safer place without me polluting it with my children,” she concluded.
For more, listen to Chelsea Handler on The Last Laugh podcast.
