Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. Sofie Hagen
local mall, the sunlight hurting my eyes and highlighting their redness, to buy as many stand-up comedy DVDs as I could for the money I needed to spend on rent. I valued stand-up higher than a place to live because stand-up was pure survival. Ellen DeGeneres talking about waiting for lifts, Ricky Gervais talking about Noah’s Ark,fn4 Danish comedians like Tobias Dybvad and Carsten Eskelund and their hilariously relatable material about things in my everyday life.
I will watch the same comedy show six times in a row in an attempt to analyse every single technicality, every movement, every choice of words.
When I was twenty-one, I discovered the comedy scene in Denmark. Comedians I had never seen before because they had yet to release DVDs and be on television. It blew me away. It meant that on top of eating, sleeping and breathing comedy, I could now also make love to comedy. I threw myself at the comedians, a sultry comedy fan who was soon to realise that the lust was not after the artist but the art. One of the comedians gracefully suggested that I should do comedy. I don’t think he meant to suggest that I did comedy instead of comedians – nevertheless, that was what made sense to me.
A comedian once left the bed straight after sex, because he had been inspired to write a joke. He sat, naked, in front of his laptop, typing furiously. I sat, naked, on the bed and watched him, and I felt like I was watching Picasso paint a picture. It was so artistic it hurt my little 21-year-old heart. And I needed more comedy. Just more and more comedy.
So when a comedian offered me a five-minute spot at an open mic, I did not dare to say no. I went home and wrote sixteen pages of what can barely be described as jokes. From then on, it was never an option not to go on stage. It sounds like a cliché and it has been overused by characters in movies who do not mean what they are saying, but: I was home.
Comedy is about trust. The audience trusts you to be funny and more importantly, you trust yourself to be funny. If you don’t trust yourself to be funny, you won’t be. The audience can smell fear, you learn that very quickly. I have done a joke to cheerful applause only for my next joke to fall flat on its face and for people to start booing. All because in the beginning of that joke, I stuttered a little bit.
Which is why the pie-eating-contest joke worked for this comedian. Essentially, the crowd of about four hundred people trusted that this comedian on stage was funny and, oh boy, did he trust it as well. He delivered that joke like every word could bring a person back to life. And they laughed. Soon after, he left the stage and my name was called.
We call them fat jokes. You can recognise them by the fat people being the butt of the joke. And if you are fat, chances are, you will recognise them by that knot they place in your stomach whenever you go to watch comedy. The ‘oh no’ feeling.
You are being ridiculed, not just by the comedian in question, but by the entirety of the audience which agrees. As a fat person, public ridicule is something you will have come to expect. All you wanted was a fun night out and now – you’re reminded that you are less in the eyes of society. You wonder if people are looking at you. If they are embarrassed for you.
When people do jokes about fat people, you are not expected to be in the room. I have never heard a comedian tell a fat joke starting with ‘you fat people’. It’s they. Them. The others. Outside of these comedy club walls. Let’s laugh at them. Suddenly, it is like walking into a room while someone is talking about you – except they do not go quiet, they keep talking, because you do not exist. My therapist once told me that the most dangerous thing you can do to a person is to ignore them.
Comedy has to be relatable to a certain extent, unless we are speaking about surreal, alternative comedy. There are utterly silly comedians doing whole shows about space-dogs and it is delightful and hilarious. But if you are talking about real life, you have to be on the same page as the audience. You are talking to a group of strangers, so you can only base your jokes on the ‘general truth’ of most people’s lives. Which is why a lot of comedy plays on stereotypes: men should be manly men who never cry and are always the big spoon, lesbians are butch and hate men and always ask me on datesfn5 and fat people are unintelligent and lazy. Stereotypes mean that you can make a joke about a group of people without having to explain it. ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics … Unless there was a pie-eating contest. Because fat people eat a lot, that’s why they’re so fat’ – this would not work as a joke. But it works when the punchline is implicit. For fat jokes to work, we all have to buy into the validity of the stereotypes.
I once saw a comedian get a huge laugh because he said that his son wanted to dress up as a princess. He just stated that fact – and the audience started laughing. The subtext was that men are not allowed to dress up as princesses.
But we are beginning to collectively understand now that some men do want to dress up as princesses and they should be allowed to. That lesbians are not necessarily butch and that they almost never ask me on dates and that men should probably be allowed to start feeling their feelings.
And people don’t necessarily laugh because they agree. Sometimes it’s an initial reaction because the rhythm automatically lends itself to a laugh. Or perhaps you laugh because you don’t want to be the dry and boring mood-killer of your friend group or maybe you laugh out of pure self-defence.
When I dated a guy in the military, he once came home laughing hysterically because of a story he had heard one of his soldier friends tell. They had all been sharing stories about how they ended up in the military and this one guy had been quiet. When he finally cracked, he told them all why.
He had wanted, his entire life, to become a gynaecologist. He went to school for years, studied hard, got good grades, got the education. On his first day as a gynaecologist, his first ever patient was a fat woman. My boyfriend at the time wiped tears of laughter from his eyes when he said, ‘And she had been sweating, of course,’ because of course we sweat. The guy had finished the check-up and walked straight out of the clinic and into the military, never looking back. The joke was that he had wanted to fondle pretty women’s privates and he ended up having to give a fat woman a medical check-up.
I remember laughing. I think I even found it funny. In doing so, I hoped to erase the fact that I was also fat. That my sweaty vagina is so gross that it sends grown menfn6 directly into a war zone in the hope of a quick and painful death. Ha ha. My boyfriend told me how everyone had laughed so hard and for so long. I remember not turning up at my next gynaecologist appointment. Maybe I will just wait till we’re in a new war against a country and they need the manpower.
A few years ago, I was sitting backstage in a comedy club watching a comedian perform. I was enthusiastically laughing at all of the new jokes he was telling that I had never heard before. He is a good comedian. Let me just speak from a comedy point of view, for a second:
Comedy is a lot of things. It takes years, sometimes decades, to learn how to do it well. Shorter words are funnier than longer words, words that begin with a hard-sounding letter are funnier than words that begin with a soft-sounding letter, the word that reveals the surprise-twist in the joke has to go at the very end of the joke, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. A stand-up performance, if you only listened to the beats, should sound like jazz. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-da-da-bam.fn7 You learn about timing, intonation, pitch, where you look at which points of the show, how to hold a microphone, how not to hold a microphone, how to cut as many words as possible from a joke, to make the shortest trip from the beginning of a set-up to the delivery of a punchline. Every single comedian who has a notable career has worked very hard for it, has died on stage in a nightclub in Plymouth for no money only to go back to a Travelodge and cry their eyes out – and yet they have driven for six hours to Leeds the next day to do the same again. Even the comedians whose jokes are hurtful.
And a comedian can be a good comedian and still be an absolute piece of trash. Jokes can be both horrendously offensive, damaging and dangerous and at the same time, be well-constructed and technically funny. Comedy is all about technique. This is not a book about how to do comedy, but I feel like this is an important point to make when I am about to criticise stand-up. And it is important for you to know when you do decide to criticise stand-up.
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