The gimlet eye - obesity; humor - Column

National Review, June 17, 1996 by John Bloom

There's always some girl around who wants you to go to Shakespeare in the Park, right?

We fall for this every year, right, guys?

And then when we get there, it's always thirty guys from Juilliard and Yale slitherin around in green leotards and rattlin off iambic pentameter Snoot Music like they love the sound of their own voices, and if you're lucky, it's Kevin Kline in green leotards, or James Earl Jones in a tunic, but no matter what happens, it's always this great meeting place where women drag men to sit in the extreme heat and try to listen to the most complicated poetry ever written. Through a beer haze!

Who thought this up, anyhow?

It's like sayin, ''Let's put on a basketball game, but make the audience members hang upside down from the rafters if they wanna watch it.''

Here's the complete audience reaction at a performance of Shakespeare in the Park:

''Wha'd he say?'' ''I don't know.'' ''Wha'd he say?'' ''Wha'd she say?'' ''Which one is he?'' ''Why'd he come back in a different costume?'' ''Wha'd he say?'' ''Do I have to walk across the stage to get to the bathroom?'' ''Wha'd the second guy say?'' ''That was great! Fabulous! Come on, let's give em a standing ovation!''

And then everybody goes home and talks about what a great Cultural Experience they had and buys a bunch of Campho Phenique to put on all the chigger bites that turn up in the next week.

I think there's hope for the future, though. A couple years ago I got dragged to this Shakespeare in the Park put on by the Joseph Papp Public Theater, which some of you might know is the most politically correct theater in America. They don't do anything unless it has at least one Filipino lesbian handicapped-rights activist in it. And here's what I thought was encouraging:

Half the play was fat jokes.

Good, old-fashioned fat jokes, from The Merry Wives of Windsor, just the way Shakespeare wrote em. They didn't change em at all. There are stand-up comics who won't even do fat jokes any more. I've had fat jokes censored from my own TV show. And here, in Shakespeare in the Park, you have, like, fifty fat jokes in one show, and nobody says a word. Nobody gets upset.

And they were danged funny.

Fat is still funny.

Skinny is funny, too, but not as funny as fat. Aristotle proved this many centuries ago.

Actually, now that I'm on the subject, I should point out that we're not supposed to even use the word ''fat'' any more. It's a TV rule. I don't know who made it up, but I'm gonna guess Norman Lear or Phil Donahue. I wouldn't trust either one of em within fifty miles of a fat joke.

So it was a little ironic when this new study came out from the National Center for Health Statistics, announcing that one-third of everybody in America is . . .

And the news announcers weren't allowed to actually say it.

What they were trying to say, though, is that one-third of America is made up of paunchy, obese, rotund, pot-bellied, oversized, elephantine, roly-poly, massive, gigantic, blubbery tubs of lard.

Is that better?

And the definition of being a Land Whale is 20 per cent or more above your correct weight, which means we've got a whole lot of Flesh Monsters that didn't get counted cause they just missed the cut-off.

Not only did they find out that there are, like, eighty million Chunkmeisters out there, but it's getting worse every year. We have 31 per cent more Walking Office Buildings than we had 10 years ago. We've got people up there in Missouri putting stress fractures in the foundations of their tract homes, you know what I mean?

We've got Lard-Ladling old people that spend $40,000 a year on six-dollar all-you-can-eat Holiday Inn buffet dinners.

AND listen to this part of it. You know how it's always the men who are accused of being couch potatoes, sitting around watchin football, nursin their beer bellies? Well, it turns out that women are worse. Only 31 per cent of the guys are overweight, but 35 per cent of the gals. We might be couch potatoes, but some of these women have backsides that look like squids seen through the glass at the Coney Island Aquarium.

And then the government tries to figure out why everybody is turning into Cheese Whoppers with arms, and their conclusion is . . . ''low physical activity level.''

Well, no kiddin, Mr. Hawking. Some of these people can't even see their feet without doing three hours on a Thighmaster first.

But the funny thing was, the media tried to report this whole story without ever using the word ''fat.''

I think this might be why we have so many Aunt Jemima Frozen Waffle People. Because nobody ever uses the word. Maybe what they really need is somebody to get in their face and say, ''You're fat. You're, like, really really fat.''

And maybe some of em would go, ''Oh, okay, yeah, when you put it like that,'' and lose some weight.

But if we don't ever say fat, they might just think their shoes are on too tight or something.

Does this make sense to you?

It made sense to Shakespeare.

See, we can learn from the classics.