POSITION PAPER
H U M O R
by Lynn Mabel-Lois
There is nothing funny about being fat in America. Every fat child learns this early in life. We are jeered,
reviled, spat upon, physically and mentally pushed around, and joked about to our faces almost incessantly. Where
is the humor in a life like that?
No, there's nothing funny about fat. Fat people learn that they must laugh first, and they think that people will
then be laughing with them, not at them. Unfortunately that's only partly true. When fat people assume their traditional
clown role, people are laughing with them and at them. Being fat and funny does give you a modicum of control over
a situation - you make the jokes so you decide when people laugh. But the point is that people will tolerate fat
people only when they are clowns. Fat people quickly find that that is the only route to even the outskirts of
slim society, and we grow used to having our few minutes as the life of the party via our masochistic humor, and
then fading away when the dancing starts.
The Fat Underground has stopped laughing. When we were fat little children we got into fights with the neighborhood
kids who pushed us around and called us whales. We got knocked around a lot, and ran home crying and hurt mentally
and physically. Eventually we learned that in order to survive we had to swallow our pride, because fat people
weren't supposed to fight for their right to human dignity. So we learned how to be funny so we could "fit
in." We learned The Lie and we crash-dieted our way up and down the scales, laughing all the way and praying
that some day we would be treated as people and not as self-described "beached whales" (Yok, yok).
We do not consider our bodies funny. We do not walk any funnier than most people, and it is not amusing to be caught
in a turnstile. Job discrimination is not funny, nor do we consider it amusing in the slightest that we can not
walk down a street or through a store without being jeered at openly.
Don't bother to tell us the latest joke about the fat lady--
not only will we not laugh, we will be offended, and by God we might just start fighting back again.
Originally Published in 1974 by the Fat Underground,
Los Angeles, California USA
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