Laughing at Odd Bodies

“We shake with joy,
we shake with grief.

What a time
they have these two,
housed as they are
in the same body”

– Mary Oliver 

Shared laughters involve a favourable environment and a common context. This is precisely why ordinary jokes need to have their targets fixed – they hit out at the marginals, adhere to an established hierarchy, practice reactionary politics, racism and sexism. We must push ourselves to wonder why governments and authorities are scared of that other branch of humour, one that is acutely political, anti-establishment, and liberating. But for now, let’s return to laughter!

Everyone loves a good laugh, because the event of laughter unhinges the body through spasms, and comprises anti-depressant properties. Short bursts of convulsions release the body from the hardness of its bones, the adhesives of impossible days. Some laughters possess elements of subversiveness, but then there are those that tend to overpower, squash and crack down on odd bodies. 

I am interested in the relationship between laughter and bodies, the non-humorous laughter, laughter that doesn't emerge from the comic, but from vulnerability or helplessness or sexual orientation/identity or difference, laughter that is often a defence, and laughter that emerges from the 'abnormal' and radical alterity.

Since I have spent the greater part of my life as an obese individual, an overweight person (no, let's not underplay or soften things!), as a 'fat man' interacting with other ‘fat’ individuals, my subject of interrogation and empathy is, therefore, the fat man.

My observations here hold accountable all laughters that need the presence of ‘bizarre’ bodies. Without these bodies, such laughters do not exist. How then must we differentiate between laughter directed at the unprotected – at a minor accident, a socially unacceptable body (say, the fat or the transgender) or a way of dressing? I believe it always unfolds under a social contract, primarily sanctioned by a heteronormative setting, the leaders, the able-bodied individuals – the acceptable ‘normals’.

And yet, I feel, there is another kind of laughter, one that is absolutely incompatible with the brief ruptures of a humorous exchange or a gag that is only relevant under such-and-such context, or that which is bought in standup comedies or the doom-surfing joy that we experience from the crimes of endearing dogs, or dinky children, or the musical misfortune of someone falling on hard snow, or a young boy missing a branch while jumping into shallow waters. No Sirs or Madams, this is an entirely different genre of "HAHA"! 

I don't know the history of this association. Perhaps, in ancient civilisations, stoutness was the sign of wealth and fertility, and eventually got transformed into some proletarian's nightmare. Perhaps, the 18th and 19th century European art scene changed things forever or maybe it was the Victorian corsets and waistcoats. Perhaps, all of it has to do with 20th century medical science measuring obesity with chronic diseases. 

Simon Critchley writes, “Jokes are like small anthropological essays”, and goes on to elaborate Jean Morreall’s distillation of laughter into three categories: superiority theory, relief theory and incongruity theory. I would like to introduce a fourth one: threat theory, where eccentric bodies of the fat, the disabled, the over-short, the over-tall, the over-dark, the over-fair are stark reminders of physiological contingencies. The ‘normal’ self is never too far from the ‘dangerous’ others. Thus, laughter becomes a strategy to crush the perceived threat that these bodies supposedly exude. 

I suspect people are afraid of bodies that not just secrete contingency, but those that tilt towards the medicalised or are more exposed to the throes of ailments or simply operate outside the principles of the beauty industry – fat bodies are the direct victims of the fashion market.

And laughter is a relief against the force of these bodies. Turning these bodies into raw materials for quips and thigh-slappers is a ploy to reinstate the 'normal', to place the joke-makers between bodies that are 'overfed' and underfed, expanding and contracting, unattractive and hideous. In Bengal, the recurrent crack at fat people is, "They are the reasons for the famine".  

Fat men and fat women do not occupy any space in our collective literary or cinematic memory. A submissive fat man is funny, an assertive one, overbearing. Lives for fat people are spent negotiating with unsolicited advice, warnings, humiliations and bullying. What begins as a casual, offhand comment from outsiders, relatives, family and friends, rapidly spirals into an established mode of address, an alien 'truth' that feeds both identity and memory. Every recollection related to fat people is funny. Oftentimes, they are remembered solely because they were fat. 

In a group, they bring unintentional comedy to the table, and yet they stick around because everything seems merciful to them. Any kind of acceptability is the highest form of kindness. The fat person’s identity is forever suspended between a slave and a clown. To doctors they are anomalies to be cured, in the sexual jungle they are neither predators nor preys, on a crowded bus, the topic of hot murmur. 

Time passes, and the fat person sees eyes everywhere, even when they are utterly absent. They’re also there in the mirror, on the street, in the classroom, while sitting, standing, walking, in waking and dreaming lives as they gaze at themselves being gazed at. The shirt is too tight, there is too much food at lunch, the pillion exerts too much pressure on the wheels. Shame swallows all sadness. Instead of tears, there is constant caution, anxiety rather than desirability and guilt in place of spotless happiness. 

In the world of blubber, they are always the harmless elephant, never the austere whale. Eventually, every ounce of flesh feels like a surplus. They imagine that someday they will bloat like a helium balloon and lose themselves in the vastness of the skies – the only thing that is bigger than them – or it must be their lardy mass that is thrusting the planet down and outside its orbiting lines. They are the marginal rotunda, but never the circular magnificence of the sun or the moon. 

These are the birthplaces of body dysmorphia. And at times, they fancy that all of it really is a prosthetic suit, and that at the end of the day they can just give it back to the makeup department, thank the artist, and return home light and full of air.  

Post script

In an alternate universe, an obese Milan Kundera may have authored The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Fat. I know everything I write here will resonate with so many bodies out there. And since I haven't been all bodies everywhere, I have sadly limited the scope of this article to fat lives. I write this not to lay claim to the reader’s sympathy or tenderness, but to ask everyone to simply be indifferent toward fat bodies, to leave them alone, to not care so much, to stop being so concerned, and to stop staring if possible. Let the fat-men and fat-women be. 

Asijit Datta is an associate professor, SCMC, Symbiosis University, Pune.

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