Updated July 6
Midway through Goldie Hawn and Michael Eisner’s on-stage conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Thursday, the former Disney CEO proposed a theory for what made Hawn stand out in Hollywood over the years.
“From my position, the hardest artist to find is a beautiful, funny woman,” he said. “By far. They usually—boy am I going to get in trouble, I know this goes online—but usually, unbelievably beautiful women, you being an exception, are not funny.”
It’s a statement that recalls Christopher Hitchens’s Vanity Fair essay, “Why Aren’t Women Funny?,” which drew big controversy upon its publication in 2007, given the success of women comedians from Lucille Ball to Tina Fey. For her part, Hawn said she agreed that she may owe her sense of humor to her being an “ugly duckling” growing up.
“You didn’t think you were beautiful,” Eisner said. “I know women who have been told they're beautiful, they win Miss Arkansas, they don't ever have to get attention other than with their looks. So they don't tell a joke. In the history of the motion-picture business, the number of beautiful, really beautiful women—a Lucille Ball—that are funny, is impossible to find.”
Earlier in the wide-ranging discussion of Hawn’s career and current charity efforts, Eisner had asked her about Hollywood sexism. She’d worked in can-can routines and even danced in cages in her early days, and the men who watched her were just as “disgusting” as you’d expect.