Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. Sofie Hagen
He knew how to write jokes. He knew his craft. And then he closed on his final joke:
‘This girl was unattractive. I’m not going to say in what way, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So if you think brunettes are unattractive, imagine she was brunette. If you hate big noses, imagine she had a big nose. And if you’re me, imagine she’s fat.’
He left the stage and came down backstage to the sound of the audience applauding. I couldn’t congratulate him on a good set. I couldn’t make myself do it. The joke had worked, the crowd had laughed, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Fortunately for me, another comedian spoke:
‘You’ve been in the sun all day?’ she asked him, as his face was bright red.
‘It’s because I’m a redhead and I forgot to put on sunscreen today,’ he explained with a sadness in his voice. ‘I don’t think you guys understand how hard it is. How many comments I have to listen to every summer. From friends and strangers. You guys don’t understand,’ he said.
And looked me in the eyes. I blinked a few times, not really understanding how he couldn’t see what had just happened. How he didn’t feel like an absolute fraud, doing jokes about fat people being unattractive but somehow wanting sympathy for being teased himself – from a fat person. How he could be so ignorant as to what he had just done.
When pointing out that some jokes are hurtful and damaging, we always hear the same comments: ‘But what about freedom of speech? Can we not say anything anymore? It’s a dictatorship now. A joke is just a joke. You need to be able to laugh at yourself. Chill out.’
Freedom of speech is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. Although sometimes I daydream that we do live in a dictatorship and it is run by a strong, powerful non-man – a radical, communist, intersectional feminist, powerhouse of a non-man. We would have one day a week – say, Monday? – where men were not allowed to speak at all. That would be the day we would get things done. Then we would emerge on a six-day weekend because we would not need to work anymore. Without a man mansplaining our thoughts back to us, a man interrupting our every sentence to repeat literally what we just said, without a man needing to assert an ego or flexing his muscles, we would get shit done.
Then there would of course be all-men-are-jailed-Tuesdays. Men are allowed to talk but they can only talk to each other, because they are all in the same jail. Meanwhile, we would have a day where we did not consider the length of our skirts and where we did not need to place keys between our fingers on our way home at night. If a white van drove past us, we would just shout ‘Hi Betsy’ because it would probably just be Betsy in her white van again.fn8
But, comedy was, for me, always something free-flowing. Something that was meant to have flaws. This act of escapism where I could just make fart sounds with my mouth for ten minutes and there would be no consequences. It was something I could do without anyone telling me what I can or cannot do. There were meant to be no rules because no one could stop me.
But I now need to be more aware of every word I say. It’s not a terrible tragedy that I actually have to think before I do my job. It’s just a matter of, for example, not saying ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ but instead saying something like ‘People of the audience’ since we now know that there are not just two genders. It’s a simple action and after a few times of saying it, it just becomes your automatic go-to phrase. It is not hard work to make sure the words you say do not contribute to an already toxic culture.
I’m in the privileged position to be able to get up on a stage and keep an audience’s attention for a certain amount of time. And it is certainly a privilege to be able to get up in front of an almost exclusively white audience and feel safe in the fact that my whiteness is relatable. But being known as a woman in comedy did not make things easier – the majority of the people in the audience inherently believed that I was therefore unfunny – an attitude that is slowly beginning to change. So I am not saying that getting on stage was easy. But I felt like it was easy because I felt like I could say whatever I wanted to and not get hurt. I had never considered the fact that what I said could hurt others.
Even though it is legal for you to stand on a stage and speak from the heart, it does not mean you are not hurting people. As a comedian, I have made truly awful jokes on stage. My very first television spot was three minutes long, during which I made a joke about sexual assault, ending with the words, ‘Because women aren’t funny.’
I did not know about rape culture or internalised misogyny because I had never heard those terms before, and nor did I particularly understand why it was all so wrong.
Now, gradually, it is different. Comedy seems to be moving into an era where we are becoming more and more aware of the potential damage our words can cause. And now I stand on a stage on a daily basis in front of a lot more people and I have a lot more time in which to speak. Because of the way my career has progressed, I am now listened to more than I was when I was a 21-year-old with mediocre comedians’ spunk in my hair. I am now a professional comedian, meaning I only allow very famous comedians to spunk in my hair.fn9 So I have had to realise that I need to be careful with what I say on stage.
An audience member told me once, after a show, that she had gone to see a show in which the male straight comedian did a homophobic joke. She said, ‘I was the only one in the audience who looked queer. Everyone stared at me.’ When she left the show, two men in the queue to leave addressed her with a homophobic slur – with the confidence of a straight male comedian doing a homophobic joke supposedly ironically, but without the humour and the irony.
So I love comedy. I breathe, sleep, fuck and eat comedy, but my words have been harmful in the past and they will be in the future, because that is the very nature of existing. I still love comedy but I see how comedy is not a safe haven anymore where anything goes – comedy can be a weapon and you need to be careful that it is not pointed towards the wrong people.
I love comedy and I truly wish that I didn’t often hear fat people tell me that they feel unsafe in comedy clubs. That they always watch comedy with the expectation to be the punchline.
The comedian who did the pie-eating-contest joke recently messaged me to ask me if I would tweet about his upcoming show in London. (It’s a delicate situation, professionally. It is delicate for him to ask, and in doing so revealing to me that he was not selling a lot of tickets. And it is delicate for me to answer, because I should not create any kind of professional tension. But I decided to answer him anyway.) ‘I don’t think you want my followers to come. I can’t really tweet about someone who does negative jokes about fat people. My audience is full of fat people who are not – and should not – be ashamed of that. I hope you understand that. I’m sure you’ll sell out the show without my help.’ (He didn’t.)
He wrote back, ‘I understand,’ and I am not sure he did that either.
But I was grateful that his answer was polite. Usually, when I have called out someone for being problematic, it has not gone so well.
We need a fat Disney princess
Calling out a guy in a private message is vastly different from calling out an entire industry and therefore an entire system, especially when you do so more or less accidentally.
A few years ago, I sat down to watch a Disney film with my younger cousin. It is completely irrelevant which Disney film because what happened could have happened with any of them, literally any of them. The female lead was thin. No shocked gasps there. Classic Disney princess – eyes bigger than her mouth and nose combined (I have a fat head and it’s really difficult finding glasses – I can imagine it’s impossible for Disney princesses), and the circumference of her waist smaller than the one of her throat. I felt a twinge of self-hatred creeping up through my fat body. Immediately, I became annoyed that I felt that way. If an adult who prides herself on being body-confident can suddenly feel bad about herself because she is looking at a thin Disney princess, how does a little fat eight-year-old feel?
I took to Twitter.