Shrill
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I’m telling you this not to garner sympathy or pity, or even to change your opinion about how airplanes should accommodate larger passengers. I’m just telling you, human to human, that life is complicated and fat people are trying to live. Same as you. Reasons I have had to fly within the past five years: For work (often). To see beloved friends get married. To speak to college students about rape culture and body image. To hold my father’s hand while he died. I’m sorry, but I’m not constraining and rearranging my life just because no one cares enough to make flying accessible to all bodies.
Airlines have no incentive to fix this problem until we, collectively, as a society, demand it. We don’t insist on a solution because it’s still culturally acceptable to be cruel to fat people. When even pointing out the problem—saying, “my body does not fit in these seats that I pay for”—returns nothing but abuse and scorn, how can we ever expect that problem to be addressed? The real issue here isn’t money, it’s bigotry. We don’t care about fat people because it is okay not to care about them, and we don’t take care of them because we think they don’t deserve care.
It’s the same lack of care that sees fat people dying from substandard medical attention, being hired at lower rates and convicted at higher ones, and being accused of child abuse for feeding their children as best they can.
You can’t fix a problem by targeting its victims. Even if you hate fat people with all your heart, if you actually want to get us out of “your” armrest space, defending our humanity is the only pragmatic solution. Because no matter how magnificently you resent them, you cannot turn a fat person into a thin person in time for the final boarding call (nor a full bladder into an empty one, nor a crying baby into a baked potato). The only answer is to decide we’re worth helping.
Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes
For my junior year English requirement in high school, I took a class called “Autobiography,” because it was taught by my favorite teacher. I didn’t have anything remotely noteworthy to say about myself (Today after Basketball I Tried Red Powerade Instead of Blue Powerade but I Think I’ll Switch Back Tomorrow, I Don’t Know, I Am Also Considering Mandarin Blast: A Life, by Lindy West), nor was I particularly interested, at the time, in reading the memoirs of others (I Read This Entire Book about Florence Griffith Joyner and It Did Not Contain a Single Gryphon, Chimera, or Riddling Sphinx, BOOOOOOOO: A Life, by Lindy West). My friends and I signed up for all of Ms. Harper’s classes religiously, though, so “Autobiography” it was.
Ms. Harper was one of those young, cool teachers who understood jokes and wore normal clothes, and you could tell she still had a social life and probably went to bar trivia and maybe even a Tori Amos concert once in a while for a fun gals’ night. We were mildly infatuated with her because she was a relatable human being in the alienating, chaotic landscape of public high school—unlike, say, the primordial Spanish teacher who seemed to be carved out of desk, whose favorite lesson plan was to turn on Lambada: The Forbidden Dance* and doze off. Ms. Harper was the kind of baby-showers-and-brunch friend I imagined myself having mimosas with when I was, like, thirty-two. (Coincidentally, I ran into Ms. Harper at a movie theater when I was thirty-two, moved to giddily embrace her, and she did not remember me. FINE. IT’S FINE.)
For the final exam, we were supposed to make a presentation, ten or fifteen minutes long, about anything we wanted. Any hobby or interest that we felt made us unique—whatever our thing was. One guy showed us his scuba gear and talked about why he liked scuba diving. (I don’t remember, but “fish,” probably?) A quiet, unassuming dude brought in a massive easel, on which he displayed his painstakingly detailed step-by-step guide to “Gettin’ Dipped,” which was a kind of proto–Tom Haverford swagger manual (“Step One: Get Money”). The band kids showed off their spit valves, and the outdoor ed kids bragged about their search and rescue pagers and someone served pupusas that she made with her mom.
As the date of my presentation loomed, so did my despair. Anything that could remotely be considered “my thing” was either too childish, too insignificant, or too dorky to say out loud in front of a room full of teenagers. What—collecting miniature ceramic cat families? Choir? Feminist young adult high fantasy? I might as well do my presentation on “my binky” or “calling the cops on Jeremy’s house party” or “[whatever style of jeans is most unfashionable during your era, deep in the future, in which scholars and kings are no doubt still reading this classic book].”
How are you supposed to choose what represents you as a human being when you have no idea who you are yet? When I asked myself the question honestly—what is my thing?—the only answer I could come up with was that I liked watching TV, eating hot sandwiches, and hanging out with my friends. Tragically, I was not enough of a visionary at the time to turn “Leah, Hester, Emily, Aditi, Tyler, Claire, and a panini” into an oral report, so I was like, shrug, guess I’ll go with “watching TV.”
I really did. I stayed up all night the night before my presentation, two VCRs whirring hot on the floor of our basement, editing together a montage of all of my top clips. I arranged them chronologically—not by release date, but in the order in which I’d loved them—from my favorite when I was a toddler (John Cleese guesting on The Muppet Show) all the way up to what my friends and I were having giggle fits over at the time (Mr. Show). Even though this was pre-YouTube, pre-torrenting, pre-home-editing-software, I had everything I needed on hand: Since sixth grade, I’d been obsessively recording off the TV, and had amassed a mountain of painstakingly labeled VHS tapes. I taped Letterman and Conan every night. I taped Talk Soup, SNL, Politically Incorrect, every stand-up special on Comedy Central, Fawlty Towers, Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, the earliest episodes of The Daily Show. Anything I thought was funny, I taped it, and watched it over and over, hoping to absorb its powers.
I don’t remember everything that ended up in my montage, but I know I used the part in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (favorite movie, 1989 to present), when Bill’s trying to keep his stepmom from noticing that he and Keanu Reeves are forcing six kidnapped historical figures to do his chores: “These are my friends… Herman the Kid, Socrates Johnson, Bob Genghis Khan…” There was this Conan clip I thought was so fucking funny—a character called the “Narcoleptic Craftsman,” where the entire bit was that the Narcoleptic Craftsman would fall asleep during a woodworking segment and cut all his fingers off. “See,” Andy Richter deadpanned, “have a craftsman on, OR have a narcoleptic on. It’s when you combine the two that you get something like this.”
I cut all my treasures together on one tape, wrote up some hasty trash about how my “favorite pastime is laughing,”* claimed that this was a highly academic audit of “the evolution of my sense of humor,” and sped to class. As I floundered through my speech and the tape rolled, I could see disappointment solidifying on Ms. Harper’s face. She liked me—she said I was smart, and a good writer—and this was such an obvious cop-out. My tape was too long, and the bell rang before it was over. People wandered out without finishing it, bored. For years afterwards, thinking of that presentation made me a little sick.
The following year, just months before graduation, I met a girl named Meagan in Shakespeare class. We ran in overlapping circles, but somehow had never connected. From afar, I found her intimidating, and she never noticed me at all. I had that effect on people. In close quarters, though, assigned to the same group project, we were platonically, electrically smitten—both of us, I think, relieved to finally meet someone else who was “a bit much” for people in all the same ways. Too loud, too awkward, too boisterous, too intense. Meagan is aggressively exuberant. She doesn’t say anything that isn’t funny, which sounds like an exaggeration, but isn’t. She was bold in ways that I had never imagined, even though I’d shrugged off most of my shyness years before: Meagan was honest. She wasn’t nice to people she didn’t like. She talked back to authority figures if she thought they were feeding her bullshit. She delivered hard “n
o”s and didn’t waver.
I discovered that Meagan was an obsessive comedy archivist, just like me. It was uncanny: Her bedroom was stacked with fat loaves of VHS tapes, also painstakingly labeled (in her handwriting weirdly like mine), that she’d been recording off the TV for years, just like me. We’d drive around for hours in my Volvo, listening to Mitch Hedberg and David Cross; with the advent of Napster, we could make each other entire mix-CDs that were just audio clips from The Simpsons. Meagan spent fifty dollars on eBay—an exorbitant amount of money at the time—to get a bootleg VHS copy of every Tenacious D episode. We wore the tape out. Within months, our vocal cadence merged, until even we couldn’t tell our voices apart, and sometimes we went so long without saying anything that wasn’t a reference or an inside joke that we might as well have been speaking some feral bog twin language. We won “funniest” in the senior class poll.
We were fucking unbearable.
Comedy has always been a safe harbor for the “a bit much”es of the world. The things that made Meagan and me horrible to be around—the caterwauling, the irreverence, the sometimes inappropriate honesty, the incessant riffing—aren’t just welcome in comedy, they’re fundamental. For me, as a kid who felt lonely, ugly, simultaneously invisible and too visible, comedy felt like a friend. That’s its greatest magic—more than any other art form, it forces you to interact with it; it forces you to feel not alone. Because you can’t be alone when someone’s making you laugh, physically reaching into your body and eliciting a response. Comedy is also smart. It speaks the truth. It was everything I wanted to be. Plus, if you’re funny, it doesn’t matter what you look like.
During college, in Los Angeles, I went to comedy shows as often as I could (usually alone; my roommates didn’t much care): Patton Oswalt working out new material at M Bar, Paul F. Tompkins singing “Danny Boy” at Largo, Mitch Hedberg at the Improv soon before he died. It was rapturous. We were between comedy booms at the time, and I didn’t understand that normal people weren’t starstruck by Marc Maron and Greg Proops and Maria Bamford. Why were they so accessible? Don’t they keep the celebrities in a bunker somewhere? Why was Bob Odenkirk, the most important man in the world, sitting next to me at the bar, where anyone could talk to him? How was it possible that I just accidentally body-slammed Bobcat Goldthwait outside the bathroom? Also, was he okay? (He is very small!)
Once, at the Paul F. Tompkins Show (which I never missed), I was seated at a cocktail table next to Andy Richter and his wife, Sarah Thyre. “Have a craftsman on,” I thought, “OR have a narcoleptic on. Have a craftsman on, OR have a narcoleptic on!” I ran to the bathroom and called Meagan. “Fuck you,” she said.
I wanted to be immersed in comedy—the creation of it and the consumption of it—all the time. I couldn’t sleep without Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s XFM radio show playing; I’ve probably fallen asleep to Gervais’s voice more than my own mother’s. I never wanted to do stand-up, particularly, though I certainly nursed an idealized notion of how “fun” it would be to hang out in comedy club greenrooms (“HAHAHAHAHAH”—Me now). My real Xanadu was the TV writers’ room. I couldn’t believe that people got paid to sit around a table and riff with their friends—building from scratch the kind of rich, brilliant TV universes that had felt like family to me growing up.
I graduated in 2004 with an English degree and a case of impostor syndrome so intense that I convinced myself I “didn’t have enough ideas” to become a writer of any kind.
Instead, when people asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I’d say this: “Well, I only have one skill, which is that I know how to make sentences, kind of, but I don’t know, I’m not, like, a writer.” A COMPELLING PITCH, YOUNG WEST. With no other options, or ideas, or interests, I took an unpaid internship at a free “parenting magazine” in the Valley. It was essentially a packet of coupons and ads for backyard clowns, padded with a handful of “articles” written by interns (me) and a calendar highlighting what time Three Dog Night would be appearing at the Antelope Valley Fair (four p.m.). There were three people in editorial (including me), and what seemed like hundreds in sales.
Despite still being a child myself in, like, nine out of ten ways (exception: boobs), I threw myself gamely into the “job.” If I’m going to sit in a windowless office in Encino for twenty hours a week for zero dollars, I might as well try to get some clips out of it. The slimy Young Businessman who owned the place didn’t care that I was alarmingly, dangerously unqualified to dispense parenting advice, so I was assigned pieces on anything from “what to do if your child is a bully” to “should you bank your baby’s umbilical cord blood?” (I believe my answers were, “IDK, talk to it?” and “uuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.………… yes?” respectively.) I can only hope that no families were destroyed during my tenure. To be fair, though, DON’T GET YOUR BABY BLOOD TIPS FROM A CLOWN PAMPHLET.
I finally quit the day one of the slimers made me drive to a lumberyard in South Pasadena to pick up a cord of firewood for his motivational corporate firewalking side business. This was not in the terms of my internship. He instructed me to drop the wood off—and unload it myself, alone, log by log—at this creepy, barren porn-condo that apparently was Slimer Firewalking Inc.’s HQ. He touched my arm, slipped me twenty dollars, and asked, huskily, if I’d ever walked on hot coals. “Yeah, no,” I said, moving toward the door.
“Do you want to?” he called after me. “It’ll change you.”
“I’m good!”
In retrospect, I should have sued that place for all of its dirty, on-fire clown money. Instead, I gave up on L.A. and moved back home.
Seattle, in 2005, had our own little comedy boom. I started hanging around open mics because Hari Kondabolu—college roommate of a friend—had moved to town and joined our social circle. (Coincidentally, he lived in a house with the guy who brought the scuba gear into Autobiography class, because Seattle is only four people big.) When I looked at Hari’s Friendster profile, before we’d even met, and discovered that he was a comic, I thought, “Holy shit. I’m about to have a comedy friend.”
People who were around at the time still talk about that scene with reverence. It did feel special—some lucky confluence of the right people, the right rooms, the right mentorship, the right crowds, the right branding. Comics did weird, experimental stuff and filled seats at each other’s shows. You could feel something happening. Meanwhile, the national comedy boom was percolating—Louis CK was becoming a household name, people were starting to realize the potential of podcasting.
At those early Seattle shows, a few faces were ubiquitous: Hari, Emmett Montgomery, Dan Carroll, Derek Sheen, Andy Peters, Scott Moran, Andy Haynes (WHO WAS ALSO IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY CLASS OH MY GOD), and Ahamefule J. Oluo, a tall, gloomy single dad who quickly formed a writing partnership with Hari and was folded into our social circle as well.
I did stand-up once in a while too, usually at Hari’s urging, but knew pretty quickly that it wasn’t my thing. I hated telling the same jokes over and over, and I hated the grind, which means I never tried hard enough to actually get good. (If you’ve never done stand-up in a brightly lit pizzeria at six p.m. in front of four people who were not informed that there would be comedy, try it, it’s great.) I liked performing, though, and eventually I started hosting the Seattle outpost of The Moth, a live storytelling show—three hours of crowd work twice a month. I was good at it.
Through some dark sorcery, I managed to parlay my parenting magazine clips into an internship in the theater department of the Stranger, which turned into freelance writing work, which turned into a staff position as a film critic, where I wrote goofy movie reviews and a column covering Seattle comedy called “Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes.” A representative excerpt:
WEDNESDAY 6/1
ROB DELANEY
I was going to comedy shows at night, interviewing comics, watching movies and TV for a living, and writing jokes in the newspaper all day. Then, one day, it struck me: I did it. I got paid to watch comedy and make people laugh. In just seven years, I’d actually lived up to that stupid Autobiography presentation.
Like, Toby isn’t a professional scuba diver and Jessica C. isn’t an itinerant bassoonist and Jessica R. doesn’t run a pupusa stand, although maybe she should get on that already because those things were hella good. I did hear a rumor that “Gettin’ Dipped” guy is a male model now, so technically he is professionally “dipped” (touché), but other than that, I couldn’t think of anyone else from class whose presentation actually foreshadowed the course of their life. Not that they were supposed to, of course—it was just a throwaway assignment. But for me, who’d struggled to define myself for so many years, it was an unexpected wonder to realize that my presentation wasn’t an embarrassment—it was a goddamn prophecy.
At the Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland (in 2010, its third year), I found myself standing next to Ahamefule in the back of a club, watching an old friend’s set. The guy was doing a bit about sex, or maybe online dating—I don’t remember the premise, but I remember that the punch line was “herpes,” and it was killing. It wasn’t a self-deprecating joke about the comic’s own herpes. It was about other people. People with herpes are gross, ha ha ha. Girls with herpes are sluts. I hope I never accidentally have sex with a gross slut with herpes! Let’s all laugh at people with herpes and pretend like none of the people in the room has herpes, even though, depending on which statistics you believe, anywhere from 15 percent to 75 percent of the people in the room have herpes. Let’s force all of those people to laugh along too, ha ha ha.