No Fat Jokes

I don’t make fun of fat people for a number of reasons.  Principle among those reasons is that fat people are bigger than I am.  They can squish me.  If the world were truly a Darwinian playground, fat people would rule us all.  We would most fear fat people wearing big shoes because they could step on us.  The fattest fatties with the biggest feet would be our kings and queens.

Instead, we treat fat people like shit.  We call fat people “obese,” which is not so bad because “obese” is just a word that means “fat.”  But we call the fattest fatties “morbidly obese.”  Is that very nice?  I mean, look up the word “morbid” on dictionary.com.  That is just plain old disrespectful.  We don’t have a nasty-assed name like that for any other group.  For instance, you don’t hear people calling old folks “cadaverously old” or “lifelessly geriatric” or anything, and that is an accurate description of somebody whose social security number is in fucking roman numerals.  Meanwhile, we could kick old people’s asses!  I mean, the skinniest person could step on any human fossil and squish it.  And let’s face it: we all look at grandma every now and then and wonder whether she is good for anything at all, and follow that up by briefly musing about whether she contains any nutrients we could use.  But we treat her nice anyway and smile as she tells us about how, when she was just a girl, she ate nothing but broken glass for an entire winter and wore red potato peels in her hair just to be fashionable.  Yeah, right, granny.  Still, we don’t even accurately call old people “delusionally old” or anything.  But it’s okay to call fat people “morbidly obese?”

We should respect fat people.  They are bigger than we are!  They could squish us!  And, if we keep disrespecting them, they will squish us.  Listen, we have all heard news about people so fat that they can’t fit through their front doors to leave their homes, and that may be all that saves us from their wrath. 

When you think about it, it’s got to suck to be so fat that you can’t leave your home.  And there must be some particular day when that happens.  Like, you get dressed to meet some friends to go see a movie, and then you get to the front door and you just can’t fit through it.  You can’t get outside.  So, you call your friends and you have to tell them. 

That has just got to hurt, and there must be some anger behind that.  Even worse, imagine if you go out to have a disgustingly colossal dinner befitting a behemoth such as yourself and, when you get home, that’s when you can’t fit through your front door!  You’re just stuck out there on your front lawn wondering whether the lawn gnome tastes good.  Think about that the next time you presume that fat people don’t want to squish your skinny ass.

And what if all the fattiest fatsos got together tomorrow?  I don’t mean got together in the same place, because where would they all fit?  But I mean, what if they started their own social networking site, FatSpace or WhaleBook or something?  What if they all decided that they were going to squish us?  What could we do?

Very fat people are like superheroes.  They can absorb bullets.  They can flatten cars.  Yeah, they’re not so fast, but what does that get us?  Even if we could catch them and somehow wrestle them to the ground, handcuffs won’t fit on their bulging wrists.  And what jail cell could hold them?  Already, we let fat people out of prison because they are too fat for us to hold them.  Hey, this woman got house arrest — because she was too fat to leave her house anyway — after she killed a two-year-old, probably to make a sandwich!

So, don’t fuck with the fatsos.  They are not even the minority anymore.  I suggest that, before they organize the Million Pound March, we start to show fatsos the respect they deserve.  For instance, instead of calling them “morbidly obese,” why not “godlike obese?”  And maybe we should all follow Eddie Murphy’s and Tyler Perry’s lead, spending half of our lives in fat suits and making believe it is inexplicably funny.  Hey, Tyra Banks wore a fat suit for one day and she cried so much that genuine fatties in the audience of her show who wore a flesh-and-bones fat suit 365 fucking days a year consoled her.  Poor, skinny supermodel Tyra!

By “don’t fuck with the fatsos,” I don’t mean “don’t fuck the fatsos.”  There are a lot of dudes out there who are into fat chicks and vice versa.  More power to you!  There used to be a myth that all fat people were as happy and jolly as Santa Claus getting a Christmas blowjob, and that has been replaced with a myth that all fat people are depressed and lonely.  I suspect that, just like other people, fat people might just experience a full range of emotions.  In fact, fat people probably experience emotions more intensely than the rest of us, if you count hunger as an emotion.  Whether that’s true or not, to whatever extent we can, we should strive to keep fatties happy and satisfied so they don’t decide to squish us.  So, please, fuck fat people.  Fuck away.

Like many other people, I used to have a bias against fat people, with the slightly fat drawing less derision from me than the very fattiest fatsos.  I thought that making fun of fat people was okay.  Now I realize that this was nothing more than prejudice.  I don’t make fun of them anymore.  Yes, it’s true that every one of us knows a fatty we can track walking down the street by looking at satellite images on Google Maps.  Just don’t bring it up to them anymore.  And, yeah, we all know some fatsos who call restaurants and, instead of requesting reservations, get competitive bids.  Fine.  Just keep it to yourself.

I know that it sucks that we can hardly make jokes about anybody anymore.  The sense-of-humor deficit seems to be growing and growing.  Well, that’s a fact, and your jokes had better reflect it.  We can celebrate our differences as long as that celebration is somber rather than funny, or as long as we are celebrating our differences from able-bodied, very normal white dudes.  All I can say is that you had better realize this, too.  Otherwise, you might just get squished.