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.