Les Dawson liked to tell jokes about fat people, especially, let’s be honest, fat women. “I’m not saying the mother-in-law’s fat but she hung her bloomers out to dry and a camel made love to them.” That was one of his. He found fat women so funny, he sometimes cavorted with a corpulent female dancing troupe called The Roly Polys.
Yet his fat jokes were also jokes against him for, as the obituaries pointed out, Dawson, many considered, was “the best loved fat man in Britain”.
Unless misogyny wasn’t your thing, Dawson’s death was the only unfunny thing about him. He expired during a routine medical check-up aged 59, after many years fighting (but perhaps not diligently enough) heart disease. When you think about it, it is amazing death did not claim more of that chubby generation of comics.
Bernard Manning, hilariously called a “fat white bastard” by Sir Trevor McDonald, wheezed on into his 78th year despite weighing 18st. The trouser-splitting Goon, Harry Secombe, was 79. Eddie Large got himself a new heart six years ago, but is, happily, at 68, still with us. Only Hattie Jacques, the Carry On matron, who never strode a hospital corridor unless accompanied by the exhalations of a tuba, joined Dawson in letting the fatties’ side down by dying of a heart attack aged 58.
We like our comedians larger than life: from whichever actors first played Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch for Shakespeare, through Fatty Arbuckle (dead at 46) and Oliver Hardy (at 65) at the birth of the movies, to the present where James Corden and Ruth Jones steal every episode of Gavin & Stacey from its svelte and titular leads. Fat is funny. Unfortunately, fat is not larger than death and it can kill you. In all charity, we should, surely, be pleased that so many comedians in this past year have shed so much weight.
Leading them is Johnny Vegas, who, having received a diagnosis of gout, lost 5st by renouncing the pies, kebabs and Guinness that seemed integral to his act. Stephen Fry has matched him, after being shamed by a gorilla while filming the BBC’s Last Chance to See: “I was fed up with having man boobs. I could see silverback gorillas looking at me with envy.”
Eddie Izzard was getting a little lovable round the waist himself. Following his astonishing completion of 43 marathons in 51 days his weight is down, by his own estimation, to about 10.5st. In May, Matt Lucas, who blamed his rotundity on ill-discipline and being a “greedy bastard”, announced that he had lost 28lb (12.7kg) after embracing a 1,500-calorie-a-day diet. Even the Donald Duck-voiced and recently single Joe Pasquale has fallen to 12st since working out at a boxing gym. He told Radio 4’s Saturday Live the other week: “I looked in the mirror and thought I looked like Jimmy Tarbuck.” Now, he threatens, if anything kicks off, he’ll give anyone “a good hiding”.
In America, whose landmass accommodates the fattest people in the world except at its coasts — which are occupied by social X-rays and size-zero actresses — the trend is even more pronounced.
The names Seth Rogen, Marisaa Jaret Wiokur, Monique, Ralphie May may not mean much to you, but ask any American with a slimming habit: they are role models. There is even a blog, Leosoup, which specialises in “specific dietary needs for comedians”. Its anonymous author explains that he henceforth intends to leave “being a fat disgusting slob to people such as Glenn Beck” [a TV host].
One hopes that these many pounds have evaporated at the insistence of doctors — either the stars’ own, at the expensive health MoTs demanded by their employers’ insurers, or the physicians who preach at us all through the media and like to hold up examples.
This summer James Corden and Ruth Jones were named and shamed by Professor Michael McMahon in a moderately successful attempt to publicise a survey on obesity from the Nuffield Group, whose hospitals happen to offer weight-loss surgery. “The danger of celebrities who flaunt their weight is that viewers admire them and do not take their own weight as seriously as they should,” he said.
But who listens to doctors? It is when the comedians start (or stop) mocking the afflicted that attitudes change.
In a courageous Times rant, Frank Skinner, noticing that one Briton in four was now obese, ruled that he had been right all along to ridicule fat children at school. Dawn French, Matt Lucas, James Corden had got away with their self-forgiving fat jokes for too long and had got above their station “It’s made them stars, not stooges,” he wrote. “Look at Chris Moyles on Comic Relief — he was the roly-poly hero of Kilimanjaro.” It was time, he said, to address your fat friends as “you fat pig” and shame them into dieting.
“Let’s go back to fatty baiting — they might get upset but they’ll have ten extra years to get over it.” In this startling, cruel-to-be-funny approach Skinner was following the pioneering work of Ricky Gervais, who the previous September had scolded those who saved up to go under the Nuffield surgeon’s knife.
“If your arse is too f***ing fat, stop eating and go for a run,” Gervais said. “With all the political correctness now, and the fact that food is so refined, there’s no stigma any more,” he added.
The observable objection here was that Gervais was a bit chubby himself, but he was on to that, too. “I laugh about being fat, but I should be ashamed. I should walk down the street and have people shouting ‘Fatty!’ That’s what I want, to get me out of it.” Perhaps people took up the invitation, for in recent months Gervais has begun to look rather willowy.
In that ironical way he has of having things both ways, he promised Hollywood reporters on the red carpet of his new flop, The Invention of Lying, that he still ordered pizzas in his hotel and that any shed pounds were down to his new gym, the one in his house: “I’m still a 36in waist so I’m hardly Posh Spice!” He looked pleased but he couldn’t quite own up to it.
David Mitchell, who has clearly lost a few stone between the last and present series of the Peep Show, is even more apologetic. He had started walking, he promised, only to help his bad back. “I didn’t set out to lose weight but now I’m, slightly to my shame, pleased I have.”
To his shame? Actually, one can see why Mitchell, one of the least secure men in showbusiness about his looks, might fear some preacher shouting “All is vanity!” at him. But why do the rest of us find it so hard to be delighted when we discover comedians are looking after themselves? Well, partly because it is not their job to do so. Every joke ever told was an act of amnesia, an attempt to make us forget the final, unfunny punchline that awaits us. Comedians should make us feel that they are immortal. Reports of their death should always be greatly exaggerated.
After George Burns died aged 100 in 1996, adverts featuring his shade continued to be shown on American television (a similar trick was played by Bob Monkhouse here). We do not want our funny men worrying about their cholesterol, lest it reminds us to worry about ours.
But there must be a feeling too someone already blessed with the gift of being funny is being greedy if he also wants to be better looking. Most comedians, most funny people, are funny because that is how they have learnt to punch above their weight in company. It is how they even up their status with the jocks, the bosses, the millionaires. It is how they ward off being bullied by them.
Their jokes are a form of aggression (which is why male-dominated panel games are always so competitive). And in Darwinian terms, the rest of us would be right to be afraid of the man with all the gifts: he would also get all the girls.
We can be resigned to George Clooney having his pick of women because it is in the biological nature of things that the best-looking specimens have that prerogative. Equally, we can accept Woody Allen’s successes with women — he is at the other end of the body-mass index but the point is the same — because we know he has had to earn it with wit. But what would we call a man who can charm women into bed with his jokes, but could have done so anyway with his looks? We would call him Russell Brand and most men would hate him.
The ordinary-looking but funny man who got the pretty girl was the innocent default of romantic comedies from Charlie Chaplin (thin) to Bob Hope (chunky). In a recent essay, however, Anthony Balducci, biographer of the stocky, silent-movie comedian Lloyd Hamilton, argued that during the past 30 years something has changed. Studio bosses — and it may be no coincidence that for the first time some were women — began to think that a comedy could maximise its returns only if it starred a good-looking leading man. He dated the trend to the casting of Chevy Chase against Goldie Hawn in Foul Play in 1978 and then to the rise of Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey in the Eighties and Nineties.
“Let’s go back 70 years,” he writes in Pretty Clown, Ugly Clown. “Then, we had Jimmy Durante. Now, we have Vince Vaughn. Then, we had W. C. Fields. Now, we have Owen Wilson.”
Yet in the past few years the trend has faltered. On his blog, Hollywood Elsewhere, the critic Jeffrey Wells fumes at the director-producer-writer Judd Apatow for casting “marginally unattractive guys, witty stoners, clever fatties, doughy-bodied dorks, thoughtful-sensitive dweebs and bearish oversize guys in their twenties and thirties” as romcom leads.
He watches Apatow’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall and notes that the first thing you see “the galumphy, heavy-bodied Jason Segel” do is wiggle his breasts in front of a bathroom mirror.
The offence is perhaps even more heinous in the case of paunchy Seth Rogen, who impregnates hot-bodied Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up.
Another American commentator, Darren Lee, observed, Knocked Up represents “nothing more complex or sinister than exercises in beta-male wish-fulfillment, the revenge of the nerd after years of neglect and ritual humiliation by Hollywood.”
But if Everymen such as Will Ferrel, Steve Carrel and Seth Rogen now get to play romantic leads shouldn’t that allow a podger such as Ricky Gervais to eat fatly at Morton’s even as he pursues a career in Hollywood? Human nature does not quite work that way. If Gervais is allowed a crack at the girl in David Koepp’s Ghost Town and in his own The Invention of Lying, is it not understandable that something within him half believes that on a good day he might one day, just conceivably, be mentioned in the same paragraph as Cary Grant in His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story? And if Tinseltown is prepared to treat with a dweeb like him, at least he can meet it halfway and build a gym in his home.
Sadly, the confusion is all his, just as it was all John Cleese’s when, for a bedroom scene with Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda, the Fawlty Towers’ star treated himself to new body.
It was a funny film but the sight of Cleese’s honed, flat stomached torso lodged beneath Basil Fawlty’s head was not funny, only slightly pathetic, indicative of nothing less than midlife crisis.
Let us hope that Izzard, Lucas, Gervais and the rest are really attending to their weight for reasons of their health, for if they truly think they are an ounce sexier for their efforts, they are horribly wrong. They should ask Johnny Vegas, who has been heard to say that he believes he has become less enticing to women: “I look,” he says, “less vulnerable.”
You cannot, they say, be too rich or too thin, but that rule has an opt-out clause for comedians. Even if thinness did make Mr Funny happy, it would be career suicide. As Mark Twain wrote, the secret source of humour is not joy but sorrow: “There is no humour in Heaven.”
It is just sad that Les Dawson had to find that out at least 20 years too early.
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