In The Belly (Part Four)

Let’s go back to the idea of food as an issue not taken seriously. When my brother made his comment about why he ate so much, we laughed. It was the family and we were in the kitchen while my mother was preparing dinner. The comment was sharp, to the point, and too honest not to make us laugh.

I also heard this comment:

“You’re watching the Food Network: Porn for Fat People”

This was an announcement made before a sketch on the comedy program Mad TV. They were satirizing a television marathon devoted to egg recipes (quite nauseating and funny), and I wondered about that introduction. It seemed inaccurate. Porn is porn for fat people. I doubt that there are higher numbers of people with weight problems who watch that network than pornography (I would wager that there were heavier viewers for Fox or TNN), but I understood the joke.

Fatness has always been a staple of comedy. I believe that jokes are a way of telling a truth that we may not want to accept, even if we know it in our hearts. A fat man chases a thin man and falls down, trips on something, or is blocked in some sort of passageway by their own girth. How many films from the birth of Hollywood (from the early silent movies to today’s blockbusters) have used fatness as its own punch line? Laurel meets Hardy; Abbott had Costello; John Candy, John Belushi, and Artie Lange all played the part (the latter’s memoir is even called “Too Fat to Fish”).