Читать книгу Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You - Sofie Hagen - Страница 13

A few years ago, I was waiting to go on stage at a comedy club in central London. The comedian was killing it. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. At the end of his set, he roared into the microphone, the final punchline of his show, ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics. Only if there was a … pie-eating contest.’

I eat, sleep and breathe stand-up comedy. From the first moment I watched it on television when I was ten years old; plunged into an armchair, gasping for air, tears of laughter wetting my sleeves, frantically shouting at my grandmother to ‘come quick’ because someone on television was making my insides jump up and down just by talking. That was it. Someone just talking. To me, it seemed. About me.

Six years later, when I was so depressed I could not face showering, eating or being awake, I dragged myself down to the local mall, the sunlight hurting my eyes and highlighting their redness, to buy as many stand-up comedy DVDs as I could for the money I needed to spend on rent. I valued stand-up higher than a place to live because stand-up was pure survival. Ellen DeGeneres talking about waiting for lifts, Ricky Gervais talking about Noah’s Ark,^fn4 Danish comedians like Tobias Dybvad and Carsten Eskelund and their hilariously relatable material about things in my everyday life.

I will watch the same comedy show six times in a row in an attempt to analyse every single technicality, every movement, every choice of words.

When I was twenty-one, I discovered the comedy scene in Denmark. Comedians I had never seen before because they had yet to release DVDs and be on television. It blew me away. It meant that on top of eating, sleeping and breathing comedy, I could now also make love to comedy. I threw myself at the comedians, a sultry comedy fan who was soon to realise that the lust was not after the artist but the art. One of the comedians gracefully suggested that I should do comedy. I don’t think he meant to suggest that I did comedy instead of comedians – nevertheless, that was what made sense to me.

A comedian once left the bed straight after sex, because he had been inspired to write a joke. He sat, naked, in front of his laptop, typing furiously. I sat, naked, on the bed and watched him, and I felt like I was watching Picasso paint a picture. It was so artistic it hurt my little 21-year-old heart. And I needed more comedy. Just more and more comedy.

So when a comedian offered me a five-minute spot at an open mic, I did not dare to say no. I went home and wrote sixteen pages of what can barely be described as jokes. From then on, it was never an option not to go on stage. It sounds like a cliché and it has been overused by characters in movies who do not mean what they are saying, but: I was home.

Comedy is about trust. The audience trusts you to be funny and more importantly, you trust yourself to be funny. If you don’t trust yourself to be funny, you won’t be. The audience can smell fear, you learn that very quickly. I have done a joke to cheerful applause only for my next joke to fall flat on its face and for people to start booing. All because in the beginning of that joke, I stuttered a little bit.

Which is why the pie-eating-contest joke worked for this comedian. Essentially, the crowd of about four hundred people trusted that this comedian on stage was funny and, oh boy, did he trust it as well. He delivered that joke like every word could bring a person back to life. And they laughed. Soon after, he left the stage and my name was called.

We call them fat jokes. You can recognise them by the fat people being the butt of the joke. And if you are fat, chances are, you will recognise them by that knot they place in your stomach whenever you go to watch comedy. The ‘oh no’ feeling.

You are being ridiculed, not just by the comedian in question, but by the entirety of the audience which agrees. As a fat person, public ridicule is something you will have come to expect. All you wanted was a fun night out and now – you’re reminded that you are less in the eyes of society. You wonder if people are looking at you. If they are embarrassed for you.

When people do jokes about fat people, you are not expected to be in the room. I have never heard a comedian tell a fat joke starting with ‘you fat people’. It’s they. Them. The others. Outside of these comedy club walls. Let’s laugh at them. Suddenly, it is like walking into a room while someone is talking about you – except they do not go quiet, they keep talking, because you do not exist. My therapist once told me that the most dangerous thing you can do to a person is to ignore them.

Comedy has to be relatable to a certain extent, unless we are speaking about surreal, alternative comedy. There are utterly silly comedians doing whole shows about space-dogs and it is delightful and hilarious. But if you are talking about real life, you have to be on the same page as the audience. You are talking to a group of strangers, so you can only base your jokes on the ‘general truth’ of most people’s lives. Which is why a lot of comedy plays on stereotypes: men should be manly men who never cry and are always the big spoon, lesbians are butch and hate men and always ask me on dates^fn5 and fat people are unintelligent and lazy. Stereotypes mean that you can make a joke about a group of people without having to explain it. ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics … Unless there was a pie-eating contest. Because fat people eat a lot, that’s why they’re so fat’ – this would not work as a joke. But it works when the punchline is implicit. For fat jokes to work, we all have to buy into the validity of the stereotypes.

I once saw a comedian get a huge laugh because he said that his son wanted to dress up as a princess. He just stated that fact – and the audience started laughing. The subtext was that men are not allowed to dress up as princesses.

But we are beginning to collectively understand now that some men do want to dress up as princesses and they should be allowed to. That lesbians are not necessarily butch and that they almost never ask me on dates and that men should probably be allowed to start feeling their feelings.

And people don’t necessarily laugh because they agree. Sometimes it’s an initial reaction because the rhythm automatically lends itself to a laugh. Or perhaps you laugh because you don’t want to be the dry and boring mood-killer of your friend group or maybe you laugh out of pure self-defence.

When I dated a guy in the military, he once came home laughing hysterically because of a story he had heard one of his soldier friends tell. They had all been sharing stories about how they ended up in the military and this one guy had been quiet. When he finally cracked, he told them all why.

He had wanted, his entire life, to become a gynaecologist. He went to school for years, studied hard, got good grades, got the education. On his first day as a gynaecologist, his first ever patient was a fat woman. My boyfriend at the time wiped tears of laughter from his eyes when he said, ‘And she had been sweating, of course,’ because of course we sweat. The guy had finished the check-up and walked straight out of the clinic and into the military, never looking back. The joke was that he had wanted to fondle pretty women’s privates and he ended up having to give a fat woman a medical check-up.

I remember laughing. I think I even found it funny. In doing so, I hoped to erase the fact that I was also fat. That my sweaty vagina is so gross that it sends grown men^fn6 directly into a war zone in the hope of a quick and painful death. Ha ha. My boyfriend told me how everyone had laughed so hard and for so long. I remember not turning up at my next gynaecologist appointment. Maybe I will just wait till we’re in a new war against a country and they need the manpower.

A few years ago, I was sitting backstage in a comedy club watching a comedian perform. I was enthusiastically laughing at all of the new jokes he was telling that I had never heard before. He is a good comedian. Let me just speak from a comedy point of view, for a second:

Comedy is a lot of things. It takes years, sometimes decades, to learn how to do it well. Shorter words are funnier than longer words, words that begin with a hard-sounding letter are funnier than words that begin with a soft-sounding letter, the word that reveals the surprise-twist in the joke has to go at the very end of the joke, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. A stand-up performance, if you only listened to the beats, should sound like jazz. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-da-da-bam.^fn7 You learn about timing, intonation, pitch, where you look at which points of the show, how to hold a microphone, how not to hold a microphone, how to cut as many words as possible from a joke, to make the shortest trip from the beginning of a set-up to the delivery of a punchline. Every single comedian who has a notable career has worked very hard for it, has died on stage in a nightclub in Plymouth for no money only to go back to a Travelodge and cry their eyes out – and yet they have driven for six hours to Leeds the next day to do the same again. Even the comedians whose jokes are hurtful.

And a comedian can be a good comedian and still be an absolute piece of trash. Jokes can be both horrendously offensive, damaging and dangerous and at the same time, be well-constructed and technically funny. Comedy is all about technique. This is not a book about how to do comedy, but I feel like this is an important point to make when I am about to criticise stand-up. And it is important for you to know when you do decide to criticise stand-up.

The comedian I was watching from the dressing room on this particular night was a good comedian. He knew how to write jokes. He knew his craft. And then he closed on his final joke:

‘This girl was unattractive. I’m not going to say in what way, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So if you think brunettes are unattractive, imagine she was brunette. If you hate big noses, imagine she had a big nose. And if you’re me, imagine she’s fat.’

He left the stage and came down backstage to the sound of the audience applauding. I couldn’t congratulate him on a good set. I couldn’t make myself do it. The joke had worked, the crowd had laughed, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Fortunately for me, another comedian spoke:

‘You’ve been in the sun all day?’ she asked him, as his face was bright red.

‘It’s because I’m a redhead and I forgot to put on sunscreen today,’ he explained with a sadness in his voice. ‘I don’t think you guys understand how hard it is. How many comments I have to listen to every summer. From friends and strangers. You guys don’t understand,’ he said.

And looked me in the eyes. I blinked a few times, not really understanding how he couldn’t see what had just happened. How he didn’t feel like an absolute fraud, doing jokes about fat people being unattractive but somehow wanting sympathy for being teased himself – from a fat person. How he could be so ignorant as to what he had just done.

When pointing out that some jokes are hurtful and damaging, we always hear the same comments: ‘But what about freedom of speech? Can we not say anything anymore? It’s a dictatorship now. A joke is just a joke. You need to be able to laugh at yourself. Chill out.’

Freedom of speech is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. Although sometimes I daydream that we do live in a dictatorship and it is run by a strong, powerful non-man – a radical, communist, intersectional feminist, powerhouse of a non-man. We would have one day a week – say, Monday? – where men were not allowed to speak at all. That would be the day we would get things done. Then we would emerge on a six-day weekend because we would not need to work anymore. Without a man mansplaining our thoughts back to us, a man interrupting our every sentence to repeat literally what we just said, without a man needing to assert an ego or flexing his muscles, we would get shit done.

Then there would of course be all-men-are-jailed-Tuesdays. Men are allowed to talk but they can only talk to each other, because they are all in the same jail. Meanwhile, we would have a day where we did not consider the length of our skirts and where we did not need to place keys between our fingers on our way home at night. If a white van drove past us, we would just shout ‘Hi Betsy’ because it would probably just be Betsy in her white van again.^fn8

But, comedy was, for me, always something free-flowing. Something that was meant to have flaws. This act of escapism where I could just make fart sounds with my mouth for ten minutes and there would be no consequences. It was something I could do without anyone telling me what I can or cannot do. There were meant to be no rules because no one could stop me.

But I now need to be more aware of every word I say. It’s not a terrible tragedy that I actually have to think before I do my job. It’s just a matter of, for example, not saying ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ but instead saying something like ‘People of the audience’ since we now know that there are not just two genders. It’s a simple action and after a few times of saying it, it just becomes your automatic go-to phrase. It is not hard work to make sure the words you say do not contribute to an already toxic culture.

I’m in the privileged position to be able to get up on a stage and keep an audience’s attention for a certain amount of time. And it is certainly a privilege to be able to get up in front of an almost exclusively white audience and feel safe in the fact that my whiteness is relatable. But being known as a woman in comedy did not make things easier – the majority of the people in the audience inherently believed that I was therefore unfunny – an attitude that is slowly beginning to change. So I am not saying that getting on stage was easy. But I felt like it was easy because I felt like I could say whatever I wanted to and not get hurt. I had never considered the fact that what I said could hurt others.

Even though it is legal for you to stand on a stage and speak from the heart, it does not mean you are not hurting people. As a comedian, I have made truly awful jokes on stage. My very first television spot was three minutes long, during which I made a joke about sexual assault, ending with the words, ‘Because women aren’t funny.’

I did not know about rape culture or internalised misogyny because I had never heard those terms before, and nor did I particularly understand why it was all so wrong.

Now, gradually, it is different. Comedy seems to be moving into an era where we are becoming more and more aware of the potential damage our words can cause. And now I stand on a stage on a daily basis in front of a lot more people and I have a lot more time in which to speak. Because of the way my career has progressed, I am now listened to more than I was when I was a 21-year-old with mediocre comedians’ spunk in my hair. I am now a professional comedian, meaning I only allow very famous comedians to spunk in my hair.^fn9 So I have had to realise that I need to be careful with what I say on stage.

An audience member told me once, after a show, that she had gone to see a show in which the male straight comedian did a homophobic joke. She said, ‘I was the only one in the audience who looked queer. Everyone stared at me.’ When she left the show, two men in the queue to leave addressed her with a homophobic slur – with the confidence of a straight male comedian doing a homophobic joke supposedly ironically, but without the humour and the irony.

So I love comedy. I breathe, sleep, fuck and eat comedy, but my words have been harmful in the past and they will be in the future, because that is the very nature of existing. I still love comedy but I see how comedy is not a safe haven anymore where anything goes – comedy can be a weapon and you need to be careful that it is not pointed towards the wrong people.

I love comedy and I truly wish that I didn’t often hear fat people tell me that they feel unsafe in comedy clubs. That they always watch comedy with the expectation to be the punchline.

The comedian who did the pie-eating-contest joke recently messaged me to ask me if I would tweet about his upcoming show in London. (It’s a delicate situation, professionally. It is delicate for him to ask, and in doing so revealing to me that he was not selling a lot of tickets. And it is delicate for me to answer, because I should not create any kind of professional tension. But I decided to answer him anyway.) ‘I don’t think you want my followers to come. I can’t really tweet about someone who does negative jokes about fat people. My audience is full of fat people who are not – and should not – be ashamed of that. I hope you understand that. I’m sure you’ll sell out the show without my help.’ (He didn’t.)

He wrote back, ‘I understand,’ and I am not sure he did that either.

But I was grateful that his answer was polite. Usually, when I have called out someone for being problematic, it has not gone so well.