Chelsea Handler Skips Visit To ‘Today’ Show, Then Mocks Hoda Kotb

It’s too bad Chelsea Handler said ‘to hell’ with her appearance on the Today show, because I can’t imagine many things to watch that would be more entertaining than seeing her being interviewed by the Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. The drunken, bitchy mess that might have come out of that for our viewing pleasure has been ripped from us, but at least we got a catfight out of it.

The story goes that Handler called in ‘sick’ to the show Monday, but felt good enough to make hear appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon the same day.

As Handler’s a well-known vodka connoisseur, one might assume she had the ‘cocktail flu’, but apparently that wasn’t the case, so says Handler herself to Fallon.

“I wasn’t drunk or anything,” Handler admitted. “I literally walked into a shower door this morning. I hit my eye and so everything’s puffy.”

She added, “I couldn’t go with Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kota-ba, or whatever her name is.”

“Kot-bee,” Fallon said, correcting her.

“That’s good to know,” replied Handler. “I never thought about it. I just thought, why are there two vowels like that so closely together?”

Having got word of this, the Today gals expressed Tuesday morning that they definitely weren’t amused. They also poked fun at Handler using the word ‘vowel’ in a sentence when she should have used ‘consonant’.

On air, Gifford told the cameras, “She had been sick all night, we were told. But we had a feeling something was up.”

Regarding Handler making jokes about her name Hoda exclaimed, “Consonants! Two consonants!”

She then added, “Wait – just so we’re clear – she wasn’t sick and her eye didn’t look puffy,” to which Gifford agreed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think she’s got some explaining to do.”

With these three, my bet’s on Handler.