Chelsea Handler Show Tickets / Audience taping

OK, so I read a review in the paper that the Chelsea Handler show is funny. I visit the E! website and they have a clip that is reasonably amusing. So I go to the tvtickets.com website and I ask along my friend Greg P and his wife. The directions say to show up at the studio (on the westside in the G4 studios) an hour early (taping is at 5PM, so we're there at 4PM). We're sitting on concrete for an hour and a half and we keep seeing people pass by. The handler for the tvtickets losers tells us that she's going to get in the first 10 people who show up from the tvtickets.com / Audiences Unlimited website. The people who arrive, they're either with "LA Casting" or they have tvtickets.com tickets, like us schlubs. So Greg, Alison and I are like, the 4th through 6th people to arrive. All these people who keep passing by and are actually let into the studio are from LA Casting, which is basically actors and actresses who, according to the people we talked to who worked there, are generally fitting the mold of who the show wants to have in the audience (there's a lot of cheesy audience shots during this semi-sketch comedy show). Who don't they want? Well, this guy who weighed like, 280 lbs and was 5'9" showed up as part of the tvtickets audience (about the 15th person to arrive) - so basically middle america: fat, overweight, midwesterners. Those of us who showed up relatively early, we seemed to be overall dressed reasonably well, and young - perfect for the show.

Anyway, we sat outside for about an hour and a half, and needless to say, we didn't get in. They admitted a bunch of people who THEY PAID to show up, rather than individuals who had some interest in actually seeing the show. I also heard from one of the people working there that Handler may have had a bunch of personal guests show up - so who gets screwed? We did. It was a total waste of time. The kicker was that I actually watched the show for the first time this morning - I had taped it from earlier this weekend. One of the show's annoying crawls on the bottom of the screen during the episode was advertising to come see the show in person by using tvtickets.com. Of course, they didn't mention that it would be a total waste of time, and that you'll get to watch a bunch of paid actors be admitted to watch the show while you're on the outside looking in. Absolutely PATHETIC.

As for the show itself, Handler's a handsome woman. The show itself is really obviously scripted, with any semblance of improv squeezed out of it. However, it is funnier than SNL.

Of course, that doesn't really say much.