This guest post by Ali Thompson appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.
I’ve been binge watching Parks and Recreation episodes on Netflix over the past few weeks, and I really wanted to love it. But every time I am about to decide that I do, Parks and Rec makes a fat “joke.” I have to put the word joke in quotes because the punch line seems to be that fat people exist.
It’s weird that a show that is renowned for its kindness and feminism would rely so heavily on fat jokes, but it also isn’t. The discrimination and microaggressions that fat people endure are invisible to the wider culture, and Parks and Rec is a good example of this.
Fatphobia is a consistent presence in the show. In the “Sweetums” episode Ann Perkins says, “Pawnee is the fourth most obese city in America. The kids here are beefy. They’re just beefy, big-boned, chunk monsters. I call ’em like I see ’em.”
This happens in the second season, and apparently the writers found the existence of fat people so hilarious that they never let up after. Pawnee’s motto is “First in Friendship, Fourth in Obesity.” NBC is still selling shirts and bumper stickers featuring it.
I don’t think it would be quite the same barrel of laughs if the motto of Pawnee were “First in Friendship, Fourth in Poverty.” Fat shaming and fat jokes like the People of Walmart photos are often a socially acceptable stand-in for the classist shaming of poor people. Poor people are more likely to be fat, after all. We get paid less and we’re more likely to be fired. Oh, the comedy!
There are plenty of times that Amy Poehler will say the word “obesity” as the supposed punch line of a joke, and then smirk at the camera slightly, like—“See? Fatties! Amirite??” The joke here seems to be that just the word “obesity” is funny.
I don’t accept the idea that this mockery is ironic or satirical. The assumption here is that the very existence of fat people is funny. That’s not subversive in any way. It’s “What’s the deal with airplane food” of making fun of what people look like. It is tired and lazy and hacky. And it causes real damage.
The word obesity refers to the mere existence of a fat body as a disease that must be cured. This medicalization of fat bodies has led to an increase in the stigma against fat people. Fat people are constantly confronted with microaggressions related to inaccurate assumptions about our health, even—and especially—at the doctor’s office.
Multiple studies have shown that the majority of medical personnel have negative attitudes about their fat patients and are more likely to see them as lazy and noncompliant.
Parks and Recreation seems to find this stigma hilarious. I don’t. If you had to wade through the never-ending cesspool that is being a fat woman in public and online, you probably wouldn’t either.
Parks and Rec also makes the tired old claim that all fat people have diabetes, which is not only fatphobic but is ableist because it frames diabetes as a punishment for being fat.
In the “Telethon” episode, the telethon is supposedly a fundraiser to end diabetes, but what they really seem to want to get rid of is fat people. The show repeatedly conflates diabetes and fatness and seems to find this incorrect and ableist conflation a source of high hilarity.
“Tonight we’re hoping the people of Pawnee will dip their big chubby hands into their plus size pockets and donate generously… Coming up, a very special video presentation called Even My Tongue is Fat: The Story of Pawnee.”
The existence of the Sweetums factory, which makes high fructose corn syrup, is supposed to be the reason the characters are concerned about diabetes, but here’s the thing: you don’t get diabetes from eating sugar.
Framing diabetes as the punishment fat people get for their laziness and lack of self-control drains the empathy out of any conversation about the disease. It actively harms people with diabetes because everyone, even their doctors, think they have the disease because they did something wrong. It’s hard to get decent health care when even your doctor blames you for being sick.
The “Soda Tax” episode is an example of some of the worst fatphobia and ableism of the show. It uses what Dr. Charlotte Cooper calls “the headless fatty”- images that show fat people as symbols of fear and disgust, removing their humanity so that they can be more easily turned into objects—because bodies without heads are bodies without minds or voices.
“Soda Tax” also continues to conflate fatness and diabetes and to present both as problems to be solved, proposing that a tax on soda could get rid of diabetes, which is wrong and also ableist victim blaming. The reality is that diabetes existed before soda did. It existed before refined sugar did. The idea that getting rid of a source of sugar will get rid of diabetes is profoundly ignorant.
What it does demonstrate is the current trend of the government increasing revenues by targeting taxes at despised groups. We can’t raise taxes on businesses or the wealthy anymore because that option has been removed by anti-tax partisans, but the government needs money, so who can they get it from?
Why not fat people? Or people who smoke or drink? No one will complain about targeting those people. If you really wanted to offset the harm you believe soda manufacturers are doing, why not target them for taxes, at the point of manufacturer? But politicians know they could never challenge large corporations that way. So they pick an easy target.
Fat people are the easiest target. We are framed as deserving of every bad thing. We are always available to scapegoat and target.
And then there’s Jerry—the ultimate target.
Jerry Gergich is fat, and he portrayed as stupid and clumsy. He is constantly the butt of mean jokes around the office, bullied by people he considers friends, but who openly talk about how much they hate him.
He is constantly farting. His pants rip when he bends over. He’s so stupid that he will eat anything placed in front of him, including a bowl of glue substituted for his soup. He lies about being mugged in the park, but he really fell into a creek because he was trying to retrieve a breakfast burrito he dropped.
You know fat people! They go WILD over food. Why, they’ll even try to eat food that fell into a dirty creek! Har har har.
Jerry’s wife Gayle is played by supermodel Christie Brinkley. The “joke” is how could a good-looking person could find something lovable in fat, unattractive Jerry? Fat people are only supposed to be partnered with other fat people. How could someone so low status and of such little value as Jerry be married to a conventionally beautiful woman?
Comedy!
It makes no sense to me that a show that uses imagery like this, and refers to fat children as beefy monsters, can still be lauded as the “comedy of super niceness.”
The perception of Parks and Rec as super nice, which ignores the show’s constant, mean-spirited mockery of fat people and people with diabetes, is consistent with the media’s general unwillingness to engage with actual fat people. Reporters are obsessed with getting the other side on some topics, but when it comes to publishing the most recent press release from the Fat People are Terrible Monsters Think Tank (funded by Weight Watchers and diet pills), they just copy and paste whatever and call it a day.
I am a fat woman and the constant positioning of the existence of my body as a huge problem for the entire world to butt in and have a say in solving is insulting and exhausting. My body is not a disease or a problem.
When was the last time you saw someone advocating for the rights of fat people and fat kids? Probably never. What about our right to not be bullied, discriminated against, and shamed by an entire culture?
Everyone talks about fat people, but no one talks to us.
To be fat is to be invisible. Most of the time, I won’t see anyone who looks like me anywhere in the media. And if I do, that person is the subject of mockery. I believe this contributes to the hatred of fat people and the discrimination against us. We are not considered people. We appear nowhere, except as a mean joke or as a decapitated image of a body—another fat body to be used as an object in the cultural panic that is the Obesity Plague.
The invisible fatphobia of Parks and Recreation is just a symptom of a wider cultural problem. And that problem is that fat people are not treated like people who have feelings and thoughts just like everyone else.
Ali Thompson is an artist, a writer, a fat activist, and an unapologetic weirdo. She is the creator of ok2befat.com.
Yeah this was something that Parks and Rec shoulda avoided. Plus I think Jerry and Gayle are both sweet people
While this article can be interesting to some extent, it has a very obvious flaw in the sense that it ignores parts of the show to prove its point.
I will start my comment by saying that I am a fat woman (size 14) and I have been bothered before by people assuming I had health issues even though I exercise and eat relatively well for someone who lives in the US. My current job is to work in a med school program trying to teach med students about their unconscious prejudices, particularly against fat people, and change their attitudes. I’ve had doctors look at test results and be like “you’re extremely healthy,” like it’s a big surprise, SO. I can understand where a lot of this is coming from.
But there are a few points I’d like to make about this. No matter how you look at it, it is a fact that overweight people are more likely to have certain diseases than others, just like people who smoke or work around chemicals are. It should not be a reason to make fun of them, but people’s lifestyle can be improved when they try to lose weight, if they wish to do so. Not educating people about these risks is a terrible thing to do, especially for a corporation like Sweetums, which makes money fattening people without any remorse, to the point of selling “healthy snacks” (I do not remember the exact episode here) which actually contain more calories than their other products. I live in Winston-Salem, and in the past I have written a thesis about the history of the town, which revolves of course mostly around cigarettes. Ads with doctors recommending certain brands of cigarettes continued in the area well after it had been proven that tobacco was not a harmless consumption, because tobacco was the main industry here, which supported so many jobs.
In my opinion, this is the main criticism again Sweetums in Parks and Rec; it is a corporation on which the city depends. Leslie, who works in government, is trying to bring education about the risks of obesity to the town, because in the end, people should be educated about it. You should not give away cigarettes without warning people about the dangers (and then they should be free to choose to smoke them or not), well, it’s the same with sweets and fatty foods. I’m a foodie and I choose to enjoy my carbs and my sugars, but I also try to be aware of the risks and compensate by also eating fruit and vegetables, and exercising. The problem here is that people in Pawnee do not seem to have access to this education because they are saturated with incentives to give money to their local corporation, which anyone can understand if they’ve lived in that kind of small town. The local government of Pawnee itself eats out of Sweetum’s hand. So all in all, the real joke when “4th in obesity” comes around is not “haha, fat people,” but “haha, government is owned by corporations.”
However, I agree 100% that most people will never understand that joke and will stop at the “haha, fat people” part, and the show itself relies on that to touch a wider audience with varying (and sometimes stupid) degrees of humor.
There is also a point in which the article contradicts itself, when mentioning the soda tax. Ok, ok, here, the soda tax is associated with fat people in the show BUT the whole point of the article is to say that our prejudices against fat people are not necessarily true, so why do you claim that taxing soda=taxing fat people? As stated before, I am fat, yet I rarely drink soft drinks and certainly not soda, I hate the stuff. Taxing soda = taxing people who drink soda. That’s it.
Now the Jerry part… Well, about the bullying and the food-related jokes, ok, on point, not that funny. Note however that his being fat is not the only reason why he is made fun of, he is also clumsy, overly shy, boring, etc, etc… But one can argue that all these arguments are sort of typical cliches against fat people, ok.
However, I have never seen the fact that he was married to Gayle as a joke? I mean, certainly, the first impression is “fat guy married to super model,” (honestly, no matter how it is presented, when that happens some people will always react that way, look at comments about Ann Wheaton being married to Wil Wheaton sometimes, and they’re real people, not a “joke”) but while their marriage remains a mystery for most characters, we clearly see throughout the series that Jerry is a different person at work and at home, where he is pretty much the ideal family man. Gayle is not a stupid woman who would be after some sort of money or status through him. She loves her husband and they clearly have one of the happiest relationships of the show, with several children, and the harshest word they use when they “fight” being “bozo.” If anything, you can accuse the character of Gayle of being there to try and soften the bullying of his colleagues, like “yea, but he’s not so unhappy, he has a great family life.” but I really do not think the point of their relationship is to make a joke about how they don’t “match,” although it is how Gayle’s introduction starts.
Finally, it is very convenient that the article completely forgot to mention Donna Meagle, the central, self-confident, fat seductress of the show, who is smart, successful, loves fashion and is part of the “Treat Yo Self” tandem (the essential point here being to Treat Yo Self once a year, and not all day everyday, otherwise it is not a treat anymore). But then again, she is never made fun of for being fat, so that would have derailed the “all around bad” vibe that this article is trying to give to Parks and Rec.
Now, there are some very good points made by the author of this article. It would have been so much more powerful, however, to acknowledge the things I have just listed in a game of “sure… but!” to show that although some efforts were made, they were either not enough or plain wrong, rather than make it look as though you are just ignoring them to serve some sort of propaganda.
I loved what you wrote, that’s all I have to say.
Yeah, I have to agree on the Sweetums thing. While there certainly are plenty of “fat people” jokes, I think the food industry is really meant to be the point of satire–and I think the taxes on soft drinks are genuinely meant, as in real life, to protect the citizens from corporations that don’t have their best interest in mind. That’s why most Sweetums representatives we meet are laughably evil. Remember the “child size soda?”
And in defense of Jerry, maybe this is just a difference of opinion but I tend to interpret jokes about him as actually poking fun at the other characters for being assholes. Jerry is a pretty average guy who occasionally reveals a hidden talent or story and gets laughed at anyway, because he’s the “straight man” among absurd characters.
About Jerry. I agree that what does makes the joke is him being the only completely normal character there.
But just like they do with Donna, they do have this “shock factor” that is the character that is conventionally unattractive/undesirable being either surrounded by handsome men (like Donna) or having a really gorgeous housewife (like Jerry). So yeah they do get their not-fat-related-jokes, but it’s undeniable that they’re also used to make jokes with those contrasts. Who’d expect a fat black woman to have men throwing themselves at her feet or an old fat man to have a beautiful youthful wife and Victoria Secret models daughters? The joke wouldn’t be the same if they weren’t fat (I don’t think Donna being a black woman affects on this that much as the very same thing happens with “Fat Amy” on Pitch Perfect.
One thing to say…if you are a size 14 you are NOT a ‘fat woman’.
unless she’s really really short. like really short.
I’m a bit late to the party here but as far as soda taxes go, I don’t see why you can’t be for a soda tax and be fat positive. I think it’s dangerous to be so blase about the way large corporations are destroying our health.
Sugar consumption doesn’t contribute to diabetes? ‘Conflating’ obesity and diabetes? Keep your head in the sand, and don’t be surprised when you do, in fact, develop diabetes.
Obesity, and the food addiction which usually causes it, is not ‘ok’. It should be treated like an addiction, same as smoking, drugs etc. And instead we mollycoddle and reassure the obese and overweight, so that we don’t hurt their feelings. I’m so sick of this.
I’m fat and I was not offended. Please stop telling me what is and isn’t offensive about myself. Thank you.
I am a fat woman and as much as I love ‘Parks and Rec,’ I am bothered by the show’s perpetual fat phobic jokes.
People fucking seriously need to stop being assholes to fat people, for instance with weak “jokes” on Parks & Rec that the article rightly points out — eg. “Obesity! Ha! That’s the punchline!” — but this whole angle denying that being fat is bad for one’s health is idiotic on-par with the science-denialism of Big Tobacco, the asbestos industry, etc.