Plump Pilgrims – The Funny Bone in Thanksgiving Dinner

This year, I celebrated Thanksgiving with my extended family in Boston.  We all ate dinner at my Grandma’s house - the standard turkey and mashed potatoes meal with a few sides.  As I engaged in the merriment of family reunion activities this year, I was compelled to notice how much of our laughter and amusement derived from food.  I concluded that the very concept of certain foods and eating a lot is inherently funny to us, and that Thanksgiving would be a lot more dull if we all ate separately and then just met up later to see each other without food involved.

Like most Thanksgiving dinners that I have been to, the one this year started off with a bang.  The cranberry sauce exploded just after all of my family had arrived, turning the kitchen into a chaotic warzone right from the beginning.  The green beans were the next to go, as a 3 minute microwave accidently got changed to a 33 minute microwave.  Luckily, the turkey survived the kitchen battlefield this year.  My aunt and uncle brought one precooked as a precaution, due to last year’s incident with the flammable gravy that turned our turkey into a gigantic fireball.

Aside from the live flames and certain safety issues, the chaotic events in the kitchen contributed to the light mood of the family reunion for the Thanksgiving dinner.  One reason why we find food preparation problems funny is that most people view party food as relatively harmless and expendable, so we laugh off those problems as trivial and humorous.  For example, although the cranberry sauce was greatly missed at our Thanksgiving dinner this year, we were still able to laugh about its loss because the concept of “exploding cranberry sauce” is funny.

Food that is prepared well can also lead to humor.  However, most of the humor associated with eating good food is directly connected to the humor associated with lots of good food.  During the actual Thanksgiving dinner, several of my aunts and uncles joked about eating enough to substantially expand their girth, engaging directly in the “fat humor” that this blog revolves around.   

Chris Farley - Supersizing SNL

In my opinion, Chris Farley ranks as one of the top ten comedians of all time.  He was a legend on Saturday Night Live during the early 1990’s, when the show was at its prime.  Farley used his overweight size and unbridled enthusiasm to create larger than life stage characters that were utterly hilarious.

Sometimes, Farley used his chubbiness to directly poke fun at fatties in America.  For example, during the skit “Superfans,” Farley takes the overweight sports fan stereotype to the extreme to create hilarity.  In the skit, Farley and his three friends are all diehard Polish fans of the Chicago Bears and Bulls.  They are all very out-of-shape and overweight because their main activity is to sit around a table with each other talking about sports while drinking beers and eating fast foods.  During the scene, Chris Farley’s character has a heart attack, which he explains to his friends “…[is because] there’s a small piece of polish sausage on the inside lining of my heart.”  Rather than express concern over Farley’s unhealthy eating practices, his friends congratulate him for his successful recovery from his 12^th heart attack.  The nonchalant way that the superfans talk about heart attacks makes the skit incredibly humorous.

However, Farley’s use of his extra pounds to generate laughs on SNL was not always so direct.  In many instances, Farley portrayed characters who were more memorable for their energetic personality than their chubbiness.  For example, in the “Motivational Speaker” skit, Farley plays Matt Foley, who is a desperate motivational speaker with a firecracker-like personality.  During the scene, Foley gives a desperate over-the-top lecture to a family’s two teen-aged children, telling them to not screw up in life or else they will end up as a failure like him and be “livin’ in a van, down by the river.”  Farley’s extra chubbiness in this scene helps to add to the ridiculousness of Matt Foley’s motivational speech because during his lecture, Foley continuously bumbles around the set adjusting his trousers for his large girth, wrecking havoc upon the family’s living room in the process. 

Rotund Rednecks

While America as a whole nation is viewed as overweight, certain regions of the country clearly identify more strongly with the portly stereotype than other regions do.  The region that I am going to focus on today is the South.  While the South might not be home to all of the big bellies in the US, it is certainly home to some of the funniest.  In fact, the chubbiness of many Southern characters and comedians goes a long way to making us laugh at the redneck stereotypes of the South.

One overweight redneck comedian who immediately comes to mind as a classic example of this sort of humor is Larry the Cable Guy.  Larry the Cable Guy takes the chubby country bumpkin stereotype to the extreme in his stand-up comedy routines.  His stage character loves huntin’, fishin’, and Nascar and speaks in a really Southern drawl.  While his jokes and personal anecdotes are humorous, Larry’s outward appearance and delivery of the jokes is really what makes us laugh at his stand-up routine.

On stage, Larry almost always wears a camouflage baseball cap and a sleeveless button-down top, the same sort of outfit that one would wear fishing.  The sleeveless button-down shirt accentuates Larry’s chubby arms and sizeable beer-belly, making him appear to be even heavier than his normal weight of 282 pounds.  

The contrast between the formal codes of dress that are expected of stage performers and Larry the Cable Guy’s actual appearance on his show is humorous.  Even if it does not make us laugh directly, Larry’s striking appearance facilitates our mental construction of a goofy redneck guy that we find funny.  In this way, Larry the Cable Guy’s exaggerated overweight appearance allows us to view an exaggerated redneck southern stereotype which creates humor. 

As a side note, I should mention that Larry the Cable Guy recently lost 50 pounds in 2008, bringing him down from 282 pounds to 232 pounds.  After losing this weight, Larry the Cable Guy reportedly exclaimed: “I lost so much weight, I’m down an Olsen!”

Humongous Homer

“Donuts.  Is there anything they can’t do?” –Homer Simpson

Most of you who are reading this blog about fat people in American Humor realized that it was only a matter of time before I brought up Homer Simpson.  In many ways, the inherent humor of the blubbery bunch is epitomized in the character of Homer, who represents the stereotypical beer-bellied suburban dad in America.  Homer Simpson utilized his aura of loveable chubbiness to reach new heights in American humor.  In fact, quite a large percent of the jokes and humor in The Simpsons is based off Homer’s tastes for large quantities of fatty foods.  Specifically, donuts are a recurring theme in the show, as was shown by Homer’s profound insight stated above. 

One episode that particularly comes to mind that exemplifies the focus on fattiness in The Simpsons is “King-sized Homer.”  In this episode, Homer learns that if he gains 61 pounds, he will be classified by the government as “obese” and will be able to get disability benefits.  Despite warnings from the female members of the Simpson family that this might be unhealthy, Homer quickly embarks upon his quest to gain weight with the help of his son Bart.  After consuming mountains of highly caloric foods along with a donut that Bart makes out of play-doh, Homer achieves his goal by gaining 61 pounds in one week.  

Once Homer is obese, his overweight character and appearance become more extreme.  Homer starts to wear a muu-muu because he is too big for normal clothes, and he is not allowed into a movie theatre because of he is too large for the seats.  His wife Marge gets angry at him for being fat and lazy, and Homer shirks his duties as a safety inspector for the nuclear power plant to cause a nuclear malfunction.  Luckily, Homer is able to save the day by stopping the explosion with his large girth, and he becomes a town hero for stopping the next Chernobyl.  The episode ends when Homer gets a liposuction to become thin again as his reward for saving the town.  

The “King-Size Homer” episode reflects the mixed feelings that we have toward obese people in American society.  While “King-size Homer” acts gluttonous and lazy throughout the episode, we still sympathize with Homer because he is the underdog who faces adversity and gets made fun of for being obese.  One scene in particular when we cheer for “King-size Homer” as the underdog occurs when the nuclear power plant is about to explode.  Since Homer is too large to drive a normal car or use a skateboard, he hijacks an ice cream truck and races it to get to the exploding nuclear power plant.  In many ways, the ice cream truck acts as Homer’s “superhero” vehicle, similar to the “Batmobile” in Batman.  Overall, Homer Simpson uses his large size in this episode to create this image of a hilarious obese superhero that we can laugh at and root for simultaneously. 

Why are there so many Fat People in American Humor?

As a society, we are constantly being told that Americans are overweight; US is the “fast-food nation;” and that our children our becoming more obese every second. In fact, the “obesity-epidemic” is so ingrained into our minds that American culture would be vastly different without it. Many of the negative American stereotypes such as being greedy and over-powerful abroad are rooted in the perception of our gluttony at the dinner table. Our nation’s image as the slim hard-working “Abe Lincoln” has been replaced recently by the donut-downing Homer Simpson.

With that in mind, one would probably infer that this shift in the average American’s “typical weight” would correspond with a shift in the “typical weight” for our cultural icons as well. Since most of the public leaders of American culture come from American society itself, it would make sense that they would probably put on some extra weight similar to the rest of us. However, this is not the case. Most of the cultural megastars that appear on TV or in movies are either super-athletic professional sport players or skinny actors/actresses who conform to the Western standards of beauty. However, there is one major exception to this harsh rule of only skinny people allowed on TV: comedy.

It is true, fat people exist on TV elsewhere, but not nearly as much as they appear in comedy shows. Why? Are people with larger torsos inherently funnier than the average person? Or is it something else?
To answer this question, we must consider the essence of why people laugh. According to Thomas Hobbes:

Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

In this quote, Hobbs says that we laugh for two different reasons. On the one hand, people laugh when they suddenly understand a new joke or pun. On the other hand, according to Hobbs, people laugh when they understand that someone else’s thoughts or actions are silly or foolish.

It is this second type of humor that we now focus on. In this type of humor, fat people thrive because American culture and values teach us that being overweight is a silly or foolish condition. In America, there is a strong stereotype that people gain weight by eating large amounts of donuts and cheetos, which seems like a fun but not necessarily smart activity to engage in. Thus, the fat person stereotype is one that most Americans can relate to and poke fun at simultaneously, making it the perfect foil for a comedian or comedic character. Therefore, the answer to our question is yes, our preconceived cultural notions about fat people make them inherently funnier than the average American. Score one for the big fellas!