Chelsea Handler thought she’d just be enjoying a nice dinner with her pal Katie Couric alongside “all these random people in New York City,” she said earlier this year on an episode of the On With Kara Swisher podcast.
As the friends took their places at the table, Handler didn’t think much of the two empty chairs across from her and Couric – until “in comes Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen.”
Handler swears she didn’t know they were coming. “I’m like, Oh no, I can’t do this,” she remembered. “There’s no way that I will get through this dinner.”
Chelsea Handler Went After Woody Allen
She began kicking Couric under the table, a signal that she could not endure a dinner seated across from Woody Allen without an outburst of some kind.
“Can you wait?” begged Couric.
“Wait for what?”
“Can you at least just wait until the end of the dinner?”
Handler promised that she would try, considering it a fun experiment in comic restraint. “And so I did,” she said. “I waited and I waited and I waited.”
Well, not exactly. She began asking Allen about his movies, pretending that she thought he directed the musical Annie, not Best Picture winner Annie Hall. “And he was answering the questions, which doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “I was asking about Annie, and he was talking about Annie.”
But then it all became clear. “I mean, of course he was because (Annie) is another little girl.”
But for the most part, Handler held her tongue — at least until it was time for dessert. “They passed around blackberry cobbler,” she remembered, “and then I was like, you’re gonna get it now.”
She waited until Allen took a big bite of the cobbler and then leaned in to him and Soon-Yi. “So,” she said, “how did you two meet?”
Allen’s reaction? “He spit blackberry cobbler out of his mouth,” Handler said. “He was laughing.”
But Handler wanted Swisher to know it wasn’t an inside joke. “I wasn’t laughing with him. I was laughing at him.”
Katie Couric, not picking up on the gag, assumed Handler had forgotten the fact that Allen began dating Soon-Yi’s adoptive mother Mia Farrow in 1980, meaning he met Soon-Yi when she was about ten years old. “Katie was retelling the story, and she was saying, I guess Chelsea forgot how they met because she asked them, how did they meet?”
“No, Katie. I didn’t forget how they met,” Handler assured Couric. “That was very pointed.”
Did Handler have any regrets about her rude question? “I was proud of that moment,” she boasted. “I slept like a baby that night.”