Big Boys Rule on the Small Screen

Last night I was watching "Andy Richter Rules the Universe" and I had a thought. "The Drew Carey Show," "King of Queens," "CSI," "Boston Public," "George Lopez," "Grounded for Life," "According to Jim," "NYPD Blue," "The Sopranos," "The Simpsons" -- what do all these shows have in common?  

Big boys.

No longer simply comic foils or chubby sidekicks, the leading men of these shows are supersize stars. Big men on TV aren't new -- Jackie Gleason was no size 2. But have there ever been so many all at once? It's a virtual overload. According to the National Center for Health Statistics 61 percent of American adults are overweight or obese. In a culture where so many are overweight, is this phenomenon spreading over into the entertainment world?

Funny fatties have been around a long time. Aristotle traced the origins of comedy to processions common to the Dionysiac celebrations in Greek culture. One of the principal figures in these processions was a big fat guy, usually a comic actor wearing a padded costume, with a protruding stomach and big bum -- the komast. The word seems to supply a likely etymology for the word comedy (i.e., song of the komos). The Ancient Greeks worshipped the muscular male body, and probably found the paunch and big bum of the komast funny. They weren't alone. America has had a long tradition of fat comedians, from Gleason, Fatty Arbuckle, Oliver Hardy, Lou Costello, Buddy Hackett to John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley and Drew Carey. Which begs the question, are fat men funnier than skinny men?

Entertainment honchos seem to think so. "Saturday Night Live" is never long without a hilarious hefty. Comedian Horatio Sanz is the current large man in situ, following in the footsteps of Chris Farley, who vowed to "Live fast, die young, and leave a 296-pound corpse" and famous fatty John Belushi, who also OD'd and left a big casket to fill. The New Yorker's James Wolcott called Farley "a party animal without a party." And found it "almost cruel to watch this heavy young man heave and breathe hard and hitch up his belt and thump himself on the chest to dislodge food from his throat."

Even if Wolcott doesn't think fat is funny, others appear to, judging by the success of SNL and other fat-focused shows. But just exactly who is laughing at whom? And is there a degree of complicity between the entertainment industry and audience members?

Paul Budra of Simon Fraser University, a professor of English Literature and an expert on popular culture, makes a distinction between film and television. Despite the success of a few notable examples like Eddy Murphy in "The Nutty Professor" or Mike Myers as "Fat Bastard" -- who is featured again in "Goldmember," the third segment of Mike Myers' Austin Powers magnum opus -- Hollywood doesn't seem ready for a flood of big men on the big screen.

"It is hard for me to imagine a complicity between Hollywood and the increasingly overweight population of America." As proof, Budra offers the experience of a Hollywood screenwriter and producer friend. He wrote the movie "Speed," but created a hero dramatically different than the one that ended up on the big screen. His original screenplay cast the lead as a middle-aged, overweight cop with an addiction to painkillers.  "The studio said rewrite it for Keanu Reeves," Budra says. "And the woman driving the bus can't be an overweight African American. She's going to be Sandra Bullock. The very idea that realistic character actors, large actors, be cast was a non-starter."

TV, on the other hand, appears to be warming to big-sized characters. "Television producers have recently been more open to casting character actors instead of good-looking mannequins," Budra says, noting that part of this trend could be tied to the aging of the general population. "TV producers have to plan for an audience that is increasingly comprised of boomers over the age of 50. By the time one is 50 the chances of going up a size are pretty good -- I'm beginning to find this out myself.