where she was also a whole other person. Jolly and in no way obsessed with neatness and tidiness. It is almost as if it is impossible for television to portray a fat character with the same traits as a thin person.
We sometimes see ourselves reflected, but then the entire character will be defined by the fatness. The role of Kate as played by Chrissy Metz in This Is Us is exclusively built around her weight – her need to lose it is the only thing that we see in her life. Precious in the movie Precious, played by Gabourey Sidibe, is victimised by her class and by her fat body. Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect almost exclusively makes fat jokes about herself.
More often than not, we are not reflected at all. When I watch television, most of the TV shows seem to portray this science-fiction world in which all fat people have been eradicated. At some point you might be lucky to spot a fat person behind a cash register in the background and you start to feel empathy for this poor guy, who seems to have been the only one to survive the Fatpocalypse.fn3 It is bittersweet that the upside to this is that, at least, they do not portray us negatively. We walk into the house of mirrors and when we look into the mirror, there is no reflection. It is like we do not exist.
It’s called ‘symbolic annihilation’. It’s a term coined in 1976 by George Gerbner to describe the absence of representation in the media. Basically: by not being represented at all, it sends the signal that you don’t matter. It’s a method of making sure that we keep oppressing the same groups of people. If, every time we look at a television, everyone who is not a white man feels a bit worse, it helps to maintain the current system: where the white man is in charge of almost everything. Representation is directly connected to self-esteem – one of the most important traits to possess when asserting yourself in the world. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you believe that you matter more than others, you will place yourself in that position. Likewise, if you feel like you don’t, you will let others assert themselves over you.
In 1978, Gaye Tuchman divided symbolic annihilation into three aspects: omission, trivialisation and condemnation, saying that it’s not just about lack of representation, it’s also the ridicule and trivialising of these groups – say, when a TV show or movie only places a fat person in the show as the ‘fat friend’ (Rebel Wilson in How To Be Single) or when a character is temporarily (very temporarily) put in a fat-suit to signify that they’re depressed (Andy in Modern Family, when he realises that he isn’t in love with his fiancée) or that they were a loser once (Schmidt in New Girl, Fat Monica in Friends). In a lot of movies, you will often see women getting murdered or raped. It seems like Hollywood’s go-to tool to get a storyline going. The woman is angry because she was once raped. The man is a bit of a bad guy, so he murders a lady. It trivialises something that is an actual issue and uses women’s lives as props to add excitement to a film. There are more naked (for no apparent reason) and murdered women on television and in films than there are women with multifaceted personalities.
There are more naked and murdered women on television and in films than there are fat women.
So, when talking about reflection and representation, it feels appropriate to look at the industry I belong to.
Fat in stand-up
A few years ago, I was waiting to go on stage at a comedy club in central London. The comedian was killing it. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. At the end of his set, he roared into the microphone, the final punchline of his show, ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics. Only if there was a … pie-eating contest.’
I eat, sleep and breathe stand-up comedy. From the first moment I watched it on television when I was ten years old; plunged into an armchair, gasping for air, tears of laughter wetting my sleeves, frantically shouting at my grandmother to ‘come quick’ because someone on television was making my insides jump up and down just by talking. That was it. Someone just talking. To me, it seemed. About me.
Six years later, when I was so depressed I could not face showering, eating or being awake, I dragged myself down to the 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
