Book Review: Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler

Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, by comedian Chelsea Handler, is a stand-up comedy routine in a book, formatted into a series of anecdotes about her family, friends, boyfriends, and career. Handler's writing is conversational and accessible. It's easy to imagine her putting the book together quickly from her stand-up material. Her humor has shock-value, but it's not particularly offensive, until she starts professing her love for midgets.

She begins with her childhood, and how, when she was nine years old, she started the rumor that she was to play Goldie Hawn's daughter in the sequel to Private Benjamin. Encouraged by the newfound popularity it brings her, she carries the lie as far as it will go, even embellishing a signed photo Hawn sends her. After another early-life anecdote about her perils as a young babysitter, Handler moves on, the rest of the essays focusing on her adult life.

Reading this collection feels like indulging in a few too many drinks after a hard day: a welcome escape, but an excess one might feel slightly ashamed about the next morning. Her humor is based on being obnoxious (a word she uses to describe herself more than once in the book), outspoken, and crude-valuable qualities in a comedian. Sometimes we need a bit of the profane, lest we come in danger of taking ourselves too seriously. That is what comedians are for.

But as with most bawdy comedians, some of her humor seems uneven. It's difficult to figure out where her boundaries lie. She chastises her father for using racial slurs, and yet herself refers to little people as "midgets," "nuggets," and worse, generally regarding them as babies, or pets, confessing an obsession with them equal to her obsession with penguins.

Handler is most entertaining (and funniest) when writing about her father, a Jewish, used-car salesman who, as colorfully as Handler describes him in the book, illustrates the origins of Handler's audacity and scathing, but good-natured, humor.

Handler finds herself in the most outrageous situations, like when she is pulled over for drunk driving and is sent to the Los Angeles County women's prison for fraud because she had been carrying her sister's ID to get into bars. Her life seems to be a sequence of those circumstances in which we all find ourselves, those horrific experiences that, with time and perspective, become hilarious tales to relate at parties. Forthcoming, outgoing, and unconventional, Chelsea Handler knows how to tell those tales.