Fat is Funny

Why is fat so goddamn funny? I don’t care, I just like it. This picture of Jonah Hill is like an anti-Monday.

Let’s talk about the history of fat in funniness, limiting our discussion from this point on to Saturday Night Live.

1. First of all, we need to start with John Belushi. He’s the original fat guy (1975-79) and everybody’s favorite original cast member. He can do no wrong. He even died right, while he was still on top. Rest in Peace, Fat boy.

2. Saturday Night Live was really missing a fat boy for a while after John died. They brought on his unfunny little brother, Jim, for a couple of seasons (82-83) but that was bad. Not only was Jim not really fat (mildly fat, which is a bad place to be – Seth Rogen inhabits this no-man’s land in 2009′s Funny People and he’s only 65% as funny as usual), he wasn’t really funny, either. His medium charisma caused a lot of medium laughs. Boo. He got fired. Or quit. We don’t care. Then he was The Principal.

(See? Not very fat. Boo.)

3. Wow, where did we go from there? 1986′s best fat person was Randy Quaid, who’s not exactly covered in rolls, but then, he’s not Lou Gossett, Jr., either. Quaid killed me and is probably one of the most underrated cast members in the history of SNL.  But, again, he not really that overweight so, sorry.

3.5: Chris Farley is the easy iconic fat guy you can point to and write a blog entry about on a Monday morning with no coffee in hand. To be honest, I worship Farley as much as the next man. Nothing I can say could be as funny or as beautiful as this.

Just wondering, did he shave that center line of hair that runs so smoothly from his belly-button to his tetas? In fact, we may never know.

I read this book about SNL a couple of years ago that said that Farley once came into a read-through totally naked, smeared a head of lettuce and a handful of tomatoes on his body and said, “I’m a salad.” He is amazing. Rest in Peace there, fat boy.

4. I really don’t like Horatio Sanz (98-06), who to me represented the “cute” era of SNL, best exemplified by that bonehead Fallon. The stoned webcam sketch Sanz and Fallon used to do just really made me more angry than anything else. Sanz was this awful stereotype of the “fat sidekick,” which no one likes. To be honest, I’d take Kenan Thompson (who I’m starting to warm up to mildly), over the obese, lethargic, short-last-named Sanz. P.S, Sanz is not fat anymore. This is an abomination.

What are you, in Playgirl now?

5. Last, I want to talk about Bobby Moynihan. The consensus around Cool Married Guy is that Moynihan is, indeed, funny. I know nothing about him except (and Wikipedia told me this) he used to perform in an improv series called ASSSSCAT 3000. But I say there’s something good about him and he could rise as far as number three point five on this list.

That is all.