The End of the Funny Fat Lady

An imperfect trope might be going away for good.

- By Alison Willmore

IN THE FIRST episode of the romantic-comedy series Too Much, heartbroken 30-something Jessica (Megan Stalter) breaks into an apartment she used to live in with her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen). We know this is a mess in the making from the moment she pulls up in a cab, obviously drunk and rehearsing explanations for why it's entirely reasonable for her to swing by in the middle of the night. But it quickly escalates into full-blown disaster when she smashes the window and lets herself into a place that Zev is clearly now sharing with his new girlfriend, Wendy Jones (the model Emily Ratajkowski). Jessica calls Wendy a “fucking bitch,” then launches into a screaming tirade about how Zev leaving her was the worst thing anyone has ever done. The encounter ends with him threatening to call the cops and with her scurrying down the middle of the street to Cam'ron's “Dead or Alive,” clutching a stolen garden gnome and losing one of her shoes as she runs like some demented Brooklyn Cinderella. Watching that sequence, I thought, I know exactly who this character is. Not personally—though as a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Too Much co-creator Lena Dunham, who also found new love after decamping to the U.K., Jessica does seem familiar. But I knew her type or was convinced I did. Caught in an undignified situation, humiliated by a hot, skinnier love interest, Jessica was the latest incarnation of the funny fat lady (who is never actually that fat, merely representative of the average American woman). The funny fat lady can be wildly confident or devoid of self-esteem, but either way she's a creature of excess who tends toward sloppiness, laziness, and talking a lot, her fulsomeness a quality going deeper than flesh. She barrels through comedies as someone who's both in on and the butt of the joke, an emblem of how mistreated larger women can feel, but also someone who is expected to confront that criticism before it can be leveled at her.