Stop telling Chelsea Handler to be nice

Excoriating Handler for not being "nice enough" is an absurd double standard

On Sunday night, The Huffington Post turned their Twitter account over to Chelsea Handler. Who better to live tweet the Oscars than a comedienne who has made her career by playing the raunchy part of celebrity hater? Handler's tweets — ranging from racially tinged jokes about Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o to juvenile jabs at Angelina Jolie's international adoptions — set off a bit of a firestorm. Her awful jokes aren't worth defending, but the response to them, excoriating Handler for not being "nice enough," is about as unsophisticated as the jokes themselves.

The criticism of Handler's "cattiness" stems from the very prominent voice she's given to women in comedy in the past few years. Most recently, she received widespread attention for an op-ed in which she pushed back against a New York Times story about late night television that mentioned her only parenthetically. And at the woman-focused Makers Conference, Handler spoke frankly about choosing the nightly lineup for her E! show Chelsea Lately. "As a woman," Handler said "you have the responsibility to take care of other women."

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Stassa Edwards is a freelance writer from the Deep South.