Another day, another internet outrage.
Last Thursday Goldie Hawn and Michael Eisner
were in conversation onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival when the former
Disney CEO went out on a very precarious limb as he mused about women and
comedy:
From my position, the hardest artist to find
is a beautiful, funny woman. 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.
Then he proceeded to saw off the limb he had
crawled out on. Hawn responded that she owes her sense of humor to having been
an “ugly duckling” growing up, and Eisner countered that “You didn’t think you
were beautiful”:
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.
He was right, at least about the getting-in-trouble
part. Internet umbrage predictably ensued. “Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner
Tells Goldie Hawn 'Beautiful Women... Aren't Funny' (And The Internet Explodes),”
read a misleading Huffington Post headline. He had accidentally reopened the wounds inflicted
back in 2007 by Christopher Hitchens’ Vanity Fair essay, “Why
Aren’t Women Funny?” That polemic had inflamed feminist ire at the time, much
to the amusement of the gleefully controversial Hitchens, and Eisner had reignited
it all over again.
“Whatever possessed Eisner, who is neither
funny nor beautiful, to make these inane remarks is unknown,” Vulture sneered. Hypable dismissed Eisner as a desperate dinosaur terrified of
change in a “post-patriarchal” world, whose statement “has no place in a
civilized, post-invention of fire society.” Slate’s go-to feminist Amanda
Marcotte called Eisner a “daft sexist” whose comments were classic “mansplaining” about
women. For the final nail in his coffin, she even linked to scientific evidence
suggesting that women are just as funny as men.
But Eisner never said they weren’t. There are
plenty of examples of real sexism in the entertainment industry that warrant
attention without getting lathered up over an imaginary or harmless offense. Eisner
wasn’t trying to hold women up to a separate standard. Most comedians – male and female – are not extraordinarily attractive.
Certainly there are examples of funny, attractive actresses – maybe even many,
depending on how lax your standards are. But extraordinarily attractive and
funny? Rare, by definition. Eisner didn’t mention men, because he was talking
about women; it was in the context of complimenting Goldie Hawn by elevating
her to the level of a Lucille Ball, who is sort of the gold standard of
beautiful comediennes. Would it have been more acceptable if Eisner had told
Hawn, “There are many, many beautiful comediennes, and you were merely one of
them”?
Context is everything when quoting someone,
but internet vigilantes often don’t even bother to look past the headline, much
less read deeply enough to consider the context. All they needed to get fired
up in this instance was Eisner’s comment that in his showbiz experience it is
“impossible” to find really beautiful
women who are also really funny.
Should he have said “impossible”? No, because of course it’s not impossible.
But that harmless exaggeration doesn’t warrant hanging him in effigy.
As comedians such as Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and The
Office co-creator Stephen Merchant have complained lately, we as a culture have
become boringly prudish and hypersensitive to even the most innocuous violations
of politically correct orthodoxy. No public or even private figure can speak casually anymore without risking triggering
the tiresome Angry Villagers of the internet, whose torches and pitchforks are
always at the ready.
As Jon Ronson notes in So
You've Been Publicly Shamed, the internet has engendered “a great renaissance of public shaming…
coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence.” It is “like the
democratization of justice.” Except that this “justice” is actually the ruthless
condemnation of the insatiable mob, for whom every careless phrasing, every off-color
joke, every unintended offense is a felony, and the punishment is always
personal destruction. Then the mob moves on to the next outrage and the next target.
