Chelsea Handler Roasts MAGA, Shane Gillis at Kevin Hart Netflix Special

Chelsea Handler showed up to Netflix’s Roast of Kevin Hart on Sunday night with a list — and nobody on it was safe.

The nearly three-hour live event, held at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles and hosted by Shane Gillis, featured roasters including Handler, Pete Davidson, Jeff Ross, Tony Hinchcliffe, Draymond Green, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Kevin Hart, 46, sat and took it all. But the moments that are going to be talked about the longest weren’t really about Hart at all.

Handler vs. Hinchcliffe — and the Riyadh Callout

Handler, 51, opened her set by going straight at the comedians in the room who performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival — an event widely criticized over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. Human Rights Watch released a formal statement condemning the comedians’ participation, citing the country’s record of censorship and ongoing abuses.

“Now that your favorite leader is making the draft mandatory,” Handler said, “I assume that all of you will be signing up to go fight the war in Iran. Or do you tough-talking p—ies only go to the Middle East for comedy festivals?”

Davidson, Ross, and Hart himself were among the prominent U.S. comedians who performed at Riyadh in 2025 — all of them sitting in the room as she said it.

Then she turned her attention to Tony Hinchcliffe.

“Tony is what happens when women don’t have safe access to abortion care,” she said, raising an eyebrow. She followed it up: “Tony, quick question: if you’re here tonight, who’s keeping Joe Rogan’s balls warm in their mouth?”

Rogan, 58, and Hinchcliffe have been close for years — Hinchcliffe co-hosts the Kill Tony podcast alongside Brian Redban, and the two have appeared on each other’s shows repeatedly. Handler’s shot landed hard.

Hinchcliffe fired back during his own portion of the night, calling Handler a “cold frigid b—h.” He also noted that he had turned down a $1 million offer to perform at the Riyadh festival himself.

Hinchcliffe is no stranger to this kind of heat. He became a political flashpoint after his appearance at Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and made a sexual slur against Latino immigrants. The backlash came from both sides — Trump himself said he had “no idea” who Hinchcliffe was. Despite all of it, Hinchcliffe landed a Netflix deal in the months that followed.

In May 2025, he explained his reasoning for taking the rally gig to Bill Maher: “When I was going in to do that rally, the goal, it wasn’t just to swing a few thousand votes hopefully… It was also to f—ing have the president go, ‘That was cool. Thanks, man.’”

Handler and Gillis Go at It

The other exchange that’s going to follow this roast around for a while happened between Handler and host Shane Gillis — and it got personal fast.

Gillis introduced Handler with a volley of provocative lines. “Chelsea is a Zionist. Not saying that’s a good or bad thing. Speaking of dead kids, she’s a big fan of abortions. Chelsea’s been scraped more times than the grill at Benihana,” he told the audience.

He then escalated: “Speaking of tossing tiny shrimp into a child’s mouth, Chelsea Handler went to dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s house in 2010. Look it up, there’s articles. It wasn’t like a big party, there were like seven people there. It was like Prince Andrew and Woody Allen were there.”

Handler, who is Jewish, didn’t flinch. She came back swinging at Gillis’s own history: “Shane, just so you know, Judaism and Zionism are two different things. Just like how Chinatown and Koreatown are two different things, but your favorite slur works in both places.”

The reference was pointed. Gillis was fired by NBC less than a week after being announced as an SNL cast member in 2019, after old podcast clips surfaced of him using anti-Asian slurs. He’s since hosted SNL twice, returning in 2024 and again after that — but Handler made sure the room remembered.

The Rest of the Roast

In between the political fireworks, Hart took his lumps from everyone on that stage.

Jeff Ross, the self-styled “Roastmaster General,” walked out dressed in Eddie Murphy’s iconic red leather suit from Delirious and wasted no time: “Tonight, I’m dressed like your idol, Eddie Murphy. Because he’s not coming. Your idol doesn’t give a [damn] about you.” He also shared something genuinely moving — Hart’s joke at the Tom Brady roast two years ago, where he said Ross looked “sicker and sicker,” actually pushed Ross to get his first colonoscopy. Doctors found a Stage 3 tumor in his colon. “So thank you, little buddy, for saving my life,” Ross said.

Handler took credit for Hart’s entire career. “I was one of the first people to give Kevin a platform for his comedy with a weekly spot on ‘Chelsea Lately,’” she said. “I had no idea we would be subjected to three ‘Jumanji’ movies and two ‘Ride Along’ movies. I’m here to apologize.”

Pete Davidson compared Hart to Draymond Green’s Funko Pop. Regina Hall claimed Hart’s late mother, Nancy Hart, still communicates with her from beyond — and delivered messages from her to everyone on the stage, ending with: “She said, ‘I love you, Kevin Hart. Have fun on your big night. And now I have to get back to Michael Clarke Duncan.’”

Tom Brady made a surprise cameo — two years after Hart torched him at his own Netflix roast — then wisely left before things got truly unhinged.

And then The Rock showed up, introduced by Venus and Serena Williams. “The ‘Franchise Viagra’ is in the house,” Johnson announced. “Now this roast can go hard all night long.” He told Hart he loved him so much he’d gotten a tattoo of him on his crotch. “It’s life-sized too,” he added — and offered to show it to Hart’s wife Eniko, who was sitting in the audience. “I’m kidding. She’s already seen it.”

Hart sat through nearly three hours of it. The man earned whatever Netflix is paying him.