Now that everyone has gorged themselves on Halloween candy, and we’re all going to be packing on Thanksgiving and Christmas calories to stay warm for the winter soon, let’s talk about fat characters in media.
One of the images above is Mr. Creosote, from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. Specifically, it was the only non-gross image of the character I could find. As you can see, the fat suit he wears is incredibly obvious and non-convincing by today’s standards, but in 1983, when the movie came out, the average British person had absolutely no idea what a human being would look like if they actually gained that much weight. There were fat people in the UK at the time, but no one was that heavy.
You might also remember a film adaptation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory from this same period, where Wonka is played by Gene Wilder, where Augustus Gloop gets stuck in a tube in part because he’s fat enough to block the pipe. Again, this is what obesity used to look like in the first world. And it was rare enough that people laughed at it.
There has obviously been a strong push for people to stop laughing at fat people as raw comic relief in recent decades. When I was in high school, at least half the English teachers in the school would snidely insist that boys needed to stop saying fat women weren’t attractive, or all the girls would become bulimic and throw up everywhere, and we’d all have to take canoes to school on the rivers of barf. And then there’d be that one perfectly spherical girl who always insisted she was anorexic because every time she looked into the mirror, she saw a fat person.
but the funny thing is, it’s not fat people’s outrage at how they’ve been portrayed on TV that caused this trope to fall out of the spotlight. The real reason the fat comic relief trope has gone away from American and most other western media is simply because fat people are more common in real life.
A significant part of humor is the brain shorting out in response to things it doesn’t immediately understand or expect. For example, if a paleo-lithic man saw a lion chasing a gazelle, and the lion slipped on some mud and tumbled on its face, the man would laugh because he didn’t expect that to happen. This is how most shock humor works, and to a certain extent, toilet humor relies on this as well, since getting to see or talk about the subjects you were forbidden from talking about as a kid becomes “unexpected,” at least for the few times.
And obesity? The human brain doesn’t come with a framework for obesity. Obesity like we have in the United States didn’t exist until fifty years ago, and until recently no one knew what to expect in terms of obesity today.
But then we got desensitized to it. Americans got fatter and fatter, and we just sort of accepted that this was now normal. Then it was no longer unexpected, like a joke that was told over and over until it no longer got any laughs, and the fat comic relief trope went away because it stopped being funny.
At least, in the United States and most Western countries.
Elsewhere in the world, especially Asian and Africa, a lot of people still do not understand what American obesity truly looks like. There is this idea that, because America exports more media than any other country in the world, the rest of the planet should be familiar with what Americans actually look like. However, TV doesn’t usually put morbidly obese people up front and center.
Japan, for example, is aware that some people who are a good three hundred pounds overweight exist, but they have no idea how common they are, how they actually look, or what it’s like to actually be that fat. You won’t find much Asian media portraying fat people in power scooters, or the kinds of medical problems they might deal with, or even the idea of how much pain obese Americans can be in whenever they try to walk. There are almost no fat people in Japan, and if a Japanese woman gains a few extra pounds, her family nags her until she loses the weight and never gains it back. The idea of a culture that not only doesn’t do that but allows someone to become wider than they are tall completely baffles them.
And that’s the thing Americans forget about when it comes to obesity; it’s not just that we have a lot of fat people. We have a culture that allows that sort of thing to happen in the first place. No matter how much fat people in America might complain about the way they’re treated in the U.S., the rest of the world is much worse. Japanese people might be famously polite, but according to a number of plus-sized women who went on vacation to the island nation, even they can’t help but laugh at the rotund American women. In their country, the fat comic relief joke is still funny. It doesn’t show up in anime as often anymore, because they’re aware of how many Americans consume anime and that we don’t generally like it, but the culture gap is still very real.
Africa, on the other hand, has less of a hostility towards obesity, but understands it even less. A number of Americans visiting Africa have shown photos of obese Americans to people who don’t have easy access to the Internet, and a lot of Africans have trouble recognizing them as human beings. Not because the people of Africa are particularly cruel or fatphobic, but because American obesity has become too detached from what human beings look like in any natural setting.
These differences in culture are the reasons why media from other countries try not to include fat people at all. They know fat people exist, and in some cases, they might know what those fat people look like, but trying to present them accurately is almost impossible for those countries.
To understand this further, you also have to consider the way the weight loss industry has changed over the years as well. In the United States, at least during the 90s and 2000s, a significant chunk of America’s economy was built around weight loss, be it in the form of pills to help you lose weight, weight reduction surgeries such as liposuction became popular, gyms were advertising lots of programs for shedding body fat. In fact, many gyms were actually caught selling more membership cards than they actually had capacity in their facilities, because they were banking on the fact that people wouldn’t actually show up.
Then something funny happened around 2010. We had a brief period where Americans were getting healthier, and then obesity soared back up to over 40% of Americans. We reached a sort of critical mass of fat people in America, and the companies that had previously been trying to sell them weight loss products ran the numbers and realized that it was just easier to sell fat acceptance to the now massive market. This is another key component to America’s current attitudes towards obesity: we did not change our culture’s attitudes towards girth because anyone was convinced by any arguments, or because it was the “right thing to do.” The shift happened because corporations realized there was no more money in fighting the obesity epidemic, but they could make a lot of money off of pandering to it.
That’s the final part of this bizarre phenomenon that no one considers when making stories that cross cultures. While we in America are now producing books, theatrical plays, movies, and even TV shows about how glorious it is to be positively bodied, the rest of the world won’t join in because there’s not enough of a market elsewhere in the world. There simply isn’t enough money to be made selling the message that “big is beautiful” or “science is evil and wrong” in other countries, including ones exporting their own media.
When you’re writing a story that you intend (or at least hope) will cross cultural boundaries, this is something you have to consider. When I write my books, I fully hope that one day they’ll be read by people in other countries besides the U.S., including countries in Europe, the Middle East, and possibly elsewhere. This is why I don’t cram morbid obesity into any of my stories; a lot of what I write is intended to inspire people outside the U.S., and that means I have to respect the fact that they don’t have a context for things like body positivity. And as I’ve said before, respecting your audience is essential; you cannot just assume everything you think is automatically right, and you have to “correct” people who don’t agree.
This is why any company like Disney that makes entertainment for a global audience can’t fill their movies with representations of obese people from America. It’s not just that the Chinese don’t want to see it; they can’t stop themselves from laughing in shock and bewilderment at someone who’s 300 pounds overweight. They can’t help it; there’s just no way for them to focus on the rest of the film when something that far out of their comfort zone (yet still within the realm of plausibility enough to fall into the uncanny valley) is placed front and center onscreen.
Later this month, I intend to put out a video about the subject of “getting a real job,” which you should watch and show to your relatives who won’t stop nagging for you to quit your dreams of being a creator. Keep an eye out for that when it comes out!
