Nick Cannon speaks of twins, his marriage to Mariah and the dustup with Chelsea Handler

By John Katsilometes

Friday, Feb. 25, 2011 | 5:49 p.m.

Nick Cannon looks no older than a teenager.

How does he do it?

“I exfoliate!” says the entertainer who at 30 years old has been performing since age 8 and could pass for 18.

Even so, Cannon is about to be a father -- of twins, even -- with his internationally famous wife, Mariah Carey. The fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, are due in late April. During Carey’s pregnancy, the youthfully exuberant Cannon says he’s sometimes felt like papa lion. That instinct surfaced recently when Cannon became entangled in a protracted Twitter and radio scuffle with comic, talk show host and author Chelsea Handler.

The back-and-forth spilled into an appearance Handler made on Cannon’s morning radio show on 92.3 NOW-FM in New York, when she was not told that the “Nick” of “Nick and Nikki” was actually Cannon.

Cannon, in town for two shows on March 5 at Pearl Concert Theater at the Palms, described that feud -- and many other topics -- during his appearance Friday on “Kats With The Dish,” a show I’ve been relentlessly promoting since it debuted Feb. 4. Cannon is joined on this week’s show by Las Vegas Weekly film critic Josh Bell, who gives his annual Oscar picks (link to the show on The Kats Report index page). As Cannon noted during the broadcast, the Pearl shows are being recorded for concert specials on Showtime and Comedy Central.

The co-host of “America’s Got Talent,” a longtime TV and film star, DJ and recording artist, Cannon has been in the public eye for his entire adult life. As he says, “I know the game,” and is thick-skinned when dealing with public commentary about his career. But he finally retaliated against Handler’s on-air jabs at Carey and even Handler’s tweaking of his stage act.

How it all unfolded:

“For a while, she was constantly on her show picking on me and my wife. You can what you say about me, but when you start talking about my wife, I get a little sensitive. She had even made fun of my pregnant wife falling, if you go back, her and her team were clearly making fun of that. I said, ‘Hey, that’s my family,’ and that’s when the protective lion comes out,” Cannon said. “But then she went on Twitter and kind of called me out directly, especially about my craft, my stand-up comedy. I think it was, ‘Nick Cannon is on tour. I wonder who is going to be telling the jokes.’ "

For Cannon, that was about enough.

“I was like, ‘OK, that’s pretty heavy-handed,’ and I kind of went in. I happened to be around a bunch of other comics who didn’t really like her, and I let them feed my ego at the time,” Cannon said. “So I said some things, none that I don’t really regret, but that were a little harsh, and we went back and forth.”

Cannon’s radio audience heard the two talk directly on the phone during an interview that aired Feb. 17.

“She was on tour, she was doing promotions in New York, and she had no idea -- she just thought she was calling into a New York radio station of someone named Nick and Nikki -- my co-host is named Nikki,” Cannon said, laughing. ‘We told the talent booker, 'All right, just let her know she’s calling Nick and Nikki. Don’t tell her anything else.’ It’s the first interview she’s doing in the morning, and the first thing I say is, ‘Yo, when we see each other, we gonna hug it out, or are we still gonna have beef?’ ”

A nonplussed Chandler asks, “Why would we have beef? What did we do?” When Nikki says the two have had a Twitter war, and the “Nick” is actually Nick Cannon, Chandler responded, “Oh, oh my God, oh my God. … Are we in a fight? We need to make up now.”

A few moments later, she tells Cannon, “I mean you are a little bit ridiculous. You’re not terrible, you’re just a little ridiculous.” When Cannon says, “I’m just a little off my rocker,” Handler agrees. “That’s a good way to describe it. You are a little off your rocker.”

“She had no clue it was me. I feel like we ended it there, but I could feel she was still a little upset, a little uneasy, because she wasn’t prepared,” Cannon said. “I told her maybe she should’ve had her team of writers there. I don’t think she would have done it if she knew it was me. … But I had fun with it, I hope she did. It was great. I loved it.”

The two did seem to be on friendly terms at the end of the 3 ½-minute segment. Maybe they are frenemies.

More from Cannon:

• On how being the father of twins will change his life: “Now I gotta go make more money.”

• On the suggestion his kids’ names should be Kats and Dish: “Yeah, they won’t get picked on at school.”

• When asked how many carats are in his diamond-encrusted wedding ring: “A lot. Enough to feed a rabbit.”

• On his first experience as a performer, opening for his televangelist father on public-access TV: “I would open up for the preacher man at a very young age, 8 years old. I told a lot of Jesus jokes. They were cute, but they weren’t necessarily funny. … I was a ham, I was always about getting all of the attention, for people to pay attention to me -- I thought that was the norm.”

• On life as a teenage comic working the comedy clubs in L.A.: “They would keep me in the kitchen. It was like the chicken-finger comic. I would just come out when I was ready.”

• On his comic inspirations in his teen years: “Everyone from Chris Tucker to Dave Chappelle to Chris Rock. Interestingly, they also started in their teens, and they said, ‘Here’s another young kid coming up, let’s help him out.’”

• On his wide appeal: “It’s like a big smorgasbord of people I appeal to. I take ’em from 8 to 80. Some people might know me from Nickelodeon, some might know me from ‘America’s Got Talent,’ some might know me from MTV, some might follow my music career or my film career. It’s great to have that type of wide audience.”

• On appearing in nightclubs compared to theaters: “The old clubs are like the gym. You get in there, and there are heavy weights and you lift. In a theater, you get to relax a little bit more. The people are there to see a show. There are no drinks clanking, no waitresses running around. All of those distractions in a comedy club that can make it a little fun are actually obstacles.

“In a theater, I’m at ease. I have their undivided attention, and the spotlight is on me."

• On how judges on “America’s Got Talent” select the show’s field of contestants: “The show really likes a good story as much as the ability to entertain. They love a good story, and they love the extraordinary. You can be either extraordinarily bad, or extraordinarily good, but if you fall in the middle, it’s like, ‘We’ve seen that, we’ve done that.’ It needs to be, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that,’ or ‘Wow, how’d they overcome that?’ ”

• On the likelihood that rewarding performers with great personal stories might lead to a lesser talent actually winning the championship: “I would have to agree with that, but the beauty of it, and almost the safety net of it all is, America picks the winner. They pick the Top 10, actually. When you think of it, Jackie Evancho was remarkable, but America picked her to be second (to Las Vegas performer Michael Grimm, coincidentally).

“To me, it’s not really about winning the championship, it’s about making the Top 10 or Top Five, because all of those people go on to remarkable careers.”

• On being married in the public eye: “It keeps you honest. I love it, I love it. A lot of people have complaints about being married, but it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Obviously, I’m married to my dream girl. I don’t think it’s the ordinary situation, but I love every moment of it.”

• On what people might find surprising about Mariah Carey: “Her sense of humor. She is hilarious. I tape all of my shows, and we sit in bed at home and watch them. She critiques my work and has punched up quite a few of jokes. … She’s so in on the joke of everybody calling her a diva. She’s so hilarious and quick-witted, people wouldn’t believe it.”

• On Carey’s famously addled appearance at the Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards in January 2010, when she was admittedly a little tipsy from drinking too much champagne before accepting her Breakthrough Actress Award: “It was kind of a Golden Globes-type of vibe, and she was like, ‘I won an award, you’re supposed to celebrate and drink champagne.’ She’s a normal person. She embraced that and played along with it beautifully, in my opinion.”

• On the possibility that he might one day record with his wife: “I am not worthy of being in the recording studio with Mariah Carey. I make silly songs. I make little fun, you know, club music to try to make people laugh. She’s Mariah Carey. We’ve been in (the studio), but it wouldn’t even make sense. It would be like Weird Al Yankovic and Barbra Streisand doing a song.”

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow Kats With the Dish at twitter.com/KatsWithTheDish.