Theatre review: Fat Joke's brutally honest comedy-talk is a fearless indictment of fatphobia
Theatre schools, the BMI, critics, and casting auditions: everything’s fair game in a show that flips easily between biting, big laughs and darker reflections
Cheyenne Rouleau gives a tongue-in-cheek lesson on when to laugh in Fat Joke. Photo by jesse RAY
The Cultch and New World Theatre, in association with Rumble Theatre. present Fat Joke at the Vancity Culture Lab to May 5, as part of the Femme Festival
IN A SHOW that plays hilariously with counting and math, Cheyenne Rouleau pulls precisely zero punches in Fat Joke, her takedown of a fatphobic entertainment industry—and wider world at large.
Mime-obsessed acting-school instructors, judgey casting directors, the ever-shrinking Rebel Wilson, and “dusty, old, white, male” Vancouver theatre critics: all of them, and many more, are fair game in her inspired, pop-culture-infused mashup of standup comedy, theatrical monologue, and studiously researched TED X Talk (redubbed here “TEDXXXXL Talk”). It comes complete with fun flowcharts and an array of whimsically shaped projection screens. Pair that with Foley sound effects, a “pun counter” that clocks every use of words like “weight” and “heavy”, and brutally honest anecdotes, and you have a potent show that’s as uncategorizable as its star.
Rouleau is willing to go there—sometimes to dark, taboo places—and it’s fearless, perspective-shifting stuff, full of big laughs and biting humour.
First, a word about the language Rouleau uses, set out in program materials and addressed in the show. Rouleau, and a team that largely identifies as “fat”, sees that word as a simple descriptive term, akin to adjectives like “short” or “tall”. They also say they use it as political protest, fighting against the medicalization of fatness as a disease. The show is set against a wider landscape of voices reclaiming the term, such as the Your Fat Friend podcast, profiled in a film at February’s KDocs Film Festival.
It also sits nicely with a rising new form of monologue-memoir that mixes comedy, tragedy, and social critique, from Nanette to Baby Reindeer.
The cabaret seating up onstage in the intimate Vancity Culture Lab gives the room a basement-comedy-club-meets-underground-Fringe-venue vibe. Directed by Chelsea Haberlin, with dramaturgy by Jiv Parasram, the show moves quickly, adeptly shifting back and forth between more serious subject matter and jokes. At Fat Joke’s core, it tracks her own trajectory, starting from being the last to be picked in school gym class through theatre training and auditions, to discovering a Heavy Hitters baseball team, pregnancy, and self-acceptance.
Hilariously, Rouleau primes the audience with a tongue-in-cheek flow chart “Can I laugh at this problematic joke?”, followed by an even more absurdly complex one that helps one decide “Is it more offensive not to laugh?” It’s a fun way to acknowledge some of this comedy will be deeply uncomfortable—not least the literal “fat jokes”, culled from the internet, that pop up throughout the evening. Consider this early sarcastic descriptor, where Rouleau announces Fat Joke as “The show where you get to learn everything about being a fat person without having to be seen with one.” Oof.
Some of the strongest material comes from Rouleau’s own experience with the fat-shaming masses—many of the most shocking bits arising from her early stage, TV, and film work. There’s that time theatre instructors tell her that her body is “naturally comedic”, or when she gets sent to a commercial audition to play “the mayonnaise everybody hates”, or when she’s cast as a grandmother at 26. The impacts of fat-shaming on her sexual development are particularly unsettling and thought-provoking.
Except for a fact dump that comes early on, the research—sometimes read by a “small British child”—is integrated well. One of the show’s highlights comes when Rouleau, on a roll, turns her full ire on the screwed-up math, and highly problematic history, of the Body Mass Index.
Rather than a distraction, Rouleau’s tangents are entertaining. Fun and farflung touchstones—including Mr. Snuffleupagus, the Hamburglar, Jared from Subway, Skeletor, and America’s Next Top Model, just to name a few—are all vividly illustrated onscreen.
There is more, much more, packed into this stinging indictment, that will make you rethink a lot of assumptions. Fat Joke is a widely appealing show that people of all sizes will laugh with and learn from. Amid it all, Rouleau owns the material in an empowering way, never resorting to the physical self-deprecation of so many of the outsized comics tagged in the show. As her theatre instructors once observed, she is indeed "naturally comedic", but it’s not because of her body, it’s because of her brain. 
Photo by jesse RAY
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