Fat People Are Not Funny

Over the past week, something really started bothering me. The whole nature versus nurture debate really came into focus and sometimes life has a way of repeating things until you pay attention. FOX has this show called House which I started watching because it is everything that good television is suppose to be, namely 48 minutes of sarcasm, drama, with a dash of cheesiness that makes you know it’s television and not real life. The lead character on the show is a genius doctor who is bitter, sarcastic, and not the kind of person who takes things on faith; this is exactly someone I can relate to at last! Anyway, on this week’s show he asked the question, “Can all cancer kids be saints?”, which seems like a very insensitive thing to say about kids that are on the brink of death, but the question was really one of averages and one which ignored the whole Nature v/s Nurture question, by saying that on average some cancer kids just are not good kids based on purely statistical sense, you have to have some rotten apples in the basket. Although the end of the show answers the question, I started to remember why I was annoyed lately about, which has to do with fat people laughing.

We have all seen classic examples of fat celebrities like Roseanne and how humor is their trademark, and there is that whole high school thing where the fat kids always walked around laughing at everything, even when other kids played cruel jokes on them, but my point has to do with some people who are fat, and who even in their adulthood still laugh at everything. After a while the laughter becomes part of their personality and you almost assume that they are naturally upbeat or even hyper, when in reality this is nothing more than a conditioned response! And this is what really annoys me! That there are people who laugh constantly all day long at everything, and it is society who has forced this upon them, they are not suppose to be cheerful like that, there is nothing in their genes or more importantly anything really comical about them. They are just fat and they have learned humor as a defense mechanism, but that still does not change the fact that not everything that a fat person saids is actually funny, but they still laugh anyway!

This of course leads me to myself, because the opposite of a sunny disposition is a sarcastic and downright pessimistic one which I am so totally guilty of enjoying on too many occasions. Can my great pessimism be nothing more than just a conditioned response too? Perhaps some of it is, but I still want to believe that I made the choice to be grumpy about life and not that life made me this way.

I guess we can all take comfort that even if our environment shaped our personality, it was still our choice to run with it, and eventually we conditioned ourselves as much anyone else, but still it bugs me till no end.