In the first episode of the romantic-comedy series Too Much, heartbroken 30-something Jessica (Megan Stalter) breaks into an apartment she used to live in with her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen). We know this is a mess in the making from the moment she pulls up in a cab, obviously drunk and rehearsing explanations for why it’s entirely reasonable for her to swing by in the middle of the night. But it quickly escalates into full-blown disaster when she smashes the window and lets herself into a place that Zev is clearly now sharing with his new girlfriend, Wendy Jones (the model Emily Ratajkowski). Jessica calls Wendy a “fucking bitch,” then launches into a screaming tirade about how Zev leaving her was the worst thing anyone has ever done. The encounter ends with him threatening to call the cops and with her scurrying down the middle of the street to Cam’ron’s “Dead or Alive,” clutching a stolen garden gnome and losing one of her shoes as she runs like some demented Brooklyn Cinderella.
Watching that sequence, I thought, I know exactly who this character is. Not personally — though as a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Too Much co-creator Lena Dunham, who also found new love after decamping to the U.K., Jessica does seem familiar. But I knew her type or was convinced I did. Caught in an undignified situation, humiliated by a hot, skinnier love interest, Jessica was the latest incarnation of the funny fat lady (who is never actually that fat, merely representative of the average American woman). The funny fat lady can be wildly confident or devoid of self-esteem, but either way she’s a creature of excess who tends toward sloppiness, laziness, and talking a lot, her fulsomeness a quality going deeper than flesh. She barrels through comedies as someone who’s both in on and the butt of the joke, an emblem of how mistreated larger women can feel, but also someone who is expected to confront that criticism before it can be leveled at her.
The funny fat lady has been on my mind a lot lately, at this moment in which the body-positivity movement has collided with widespread weight-loss-drug access. You never forget your first, especially when you’re a budding fat lady yourself and becoming hyperattuned to messages about how the world is going to treat you. For me, it was Jan (Jamie Donnelly), one of the Pink Ladies in Grease. Betty Rizzo, played by Stockard Channing, is the girl gang’s brash, tragic leader, while Marty is the sexy one and Frenchy the sweet one. Jan is fat, and the fact that Donnelly isn’t noticeably bigger than her co-stars underscores that fatness is more a character trait than a physical description. She’s defined by her inability to control herself, which is also what makes her fun, sneaking snacks into the formal and goofing her way down the center of the Stroll. When Putzie asks her out, he prefaces his pass by saying, ever so generously, “I always thought you were a very understanding person. I also think there’s more to you than just fat.”
Being funny has always been a means of getting around Hollywood’s militant beauty standards, a path to the screen and celebrity in which the way someone looks could be a tool for laughs. From rotund Oliver Hardy pairing with lanky Stan Laurel to Jack Black becoming our go-to PG party animal, bigger men have always had a place in comedy. For women, though, a sense of humor has never been considered enough to entirely counter the failure to be conventionally attractive. And so the funny fat lady has to apologize somehow, often through self-deprecation.
Comedian Totie Fields, doing stand-up in the ’60s, would deliberately set her plump arms a-wobble while declaring, “I am a very firm believer in exercise — I mean, that’s how I stay firm!” Roseanne Barr, years after being a small-screen pioneer with her eponymous sitcom, still speaks about how she was treated in the media at the time with a distinctive mix of pride and bitterness: “It was all fat jokes, but I just laughed it off — I didn’t cry my fucking self to sleep.” While there’s also a long tradition of funny fat women who are Black, this particular tradition of self-laceration feels born of white feminism, defined by how close the character is to the dominant paradigms of prettiness without embodying them herself. Accordingly, when the real heyday of the funny fat lady as a type arrived in the 2010s, it was dominated by white women who together typified a very conditional triumph of representation, a reminder that commiseration and humiliation could run awfully close and that being willing to make fun of yourself didn’t dull the sting of the indignities slung your way.
Melissa McCarthy, whose size was an unspoken aspect of her role as supportive bestie for years on Gilmore Girls, got her big-screen breakthrough in 2011’s Bridesmaids as blunt bridal-party juggernaut Megan Price, a part that would earn her an Oscar nomination and launch her into movie stardom. The Paul Feig comedy also featured Rebel Wilson in a smaller part as one of Kristen Wiig’s oddball roommates, and Wilson would go on to make her own breakthrough the year after in Pitch Perfect as the outrageous Fat Amy, who informs people that she calls herself that “so twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back.” 2012 was also the year that Girls premiered with creator and star Lena Dunham as the callow 20-something Brooklynite Hannah Horvath, whose soft nude body was a frequent feature of her scenes of romantic misadventure. Amy Schumer, whose own TV show kicked off in 2013, would a few years later glower at her Spanx-clad reflection as Renee Bennett in 2018’s I Feel Pretty, a comedy about an insecure woman who becomes convinced she’s hot after a head injury and a movie that muddled the line between laughing at and laughing with to the point where Schumer felt compelled to defend it from what she saw as backlash.
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Even when she ran headfirst into a buzz saw of jokes about her size, the funny fat lady generated rage from a certain set of commenters. Dunham, in particular, sparked discourse so nuclear it could have fueled a power grid with Hannah’s sex scenes, which dared to suggest that men like Adam Driver and Patrick Wilson would want to have sex with her and presented nudity that didn’t cater to viewer desire. For me, the thrill of seeing a non-taut belly or a round face in a screen universe that defaulted to willowy was overshadowed by the sense that I was also seeing my own learned shame writ large. Pitch Perfect 2 and I Feel Pretty both begin with the characters in question splitting their pants in public. In the latter, Renee gets called “sir” by a man trying to hit on her friend, and in Grease, Jan keeps taking the lead on the dance floor. It’s as though fatness had degendered both of these women. The aforementioned movies and shows may be aware of the cruelty that comes with being in a world that deems you physically and constitutionally lacking, but they aren’t free of it themselves.
That doesn’t stop them from being funny — especially Bridesmaids, a comedy landmark in which McCarthy is not just a force of nature but the reason the whole thing works so well. By playing someone who has already weathered derision and emerged with an unshakable sense of self, she provides a dauntless counterweight to the brutal insecurities driving both Wiig’s and Rose Byrne’s characters. Still, you can understand why McCarthy wrote a sweet courtship for herself in 2014’s Tammy, once she had accrued enough clout to start generating her own projects. There are only so many times you can treat your own sexuality as the stuff of laughs — Bridesmaids ends with Megan zestfully eating a sandwich off the bare chest of an air marshal she makes a pass at earlier — before you begin to long for a chance to be considered a regular romantic prospect.
Widespread access to GLP-1 medications (for those who can afford them) has meant that the variety of bodies we see in film and on TV is bound to start narrowing again. It hasn’t been surprising to see McCarthy and Wilson among the ranks of the stars who have slimmed down, however they’ve opted to do it. The outcome of the intersection between the body-positivity movement and Ozempic was, in that sense, inevitable — it’s so much simpler to free yourself from the stigma than it is to continue the exhausting, endless war against it.
And yet if the funny fat lady is going to exist mainly as an artifact of a particular pop-culture era, I don’t believe it’ll only be because we’ve once again banished bigger bodies to the margins. Too Much, which introduced its heroine as though she’d be another self-flagellating martyr, actually turns her, with uneven success, into an example of self-love. Jessica, like Dunham’s Girls character, Hannah, overflows with emotions and blurts out whatever’s in her head, but you can feel Dunham straining to frame Jessica differently. The first time Jessica and her love interest, Felix (Will Sharpe), tumble into bed, the camera captures Stalter spread out, face flushed, her curves illuminated by the low light. Jessica is erratic and emotional, but she’s never beset by doubt as to why someone might find her attractive. She’s allowed to be hot. I’d like to imagine a future in which the funny fat lady is not gone but released from the burdens that have been put on her. Her body can just be another fact of her existence and her funniness the point.
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