meet your new funny fat friend

chatting about a brooklyn-based comedy show where being fat isn't the punchline

The phrase “funny fat friend” calls a certain image to your mind: the comic relief in your favorite early aughts television show, the sidekick in a beloved romantic comedy, the girl you knew in high school who never had a boyfriend and had to wear men’s jeans but somehow maintained a fraught grasp on popularity by cracking everyone up— sometimes, or maybe often, at her own expense.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that every fat person knows what it’s like to be A) the butt of the joke, B) deeply, gut-pittingly afraid of becoming the butt of the joke, or C) in an environment where they have no choice but to make themselves the butt of the joke as a matter of survival. For a long time in my own life, I was convinced that the mere act of being fat was hilarious — it’s just that the punchline wasn’t for me, it was me — and for reasons my younger brain couldn’t yet unpack, what I looked like was really, really funny for other people.

And while I now know that being fat isn’t an inherently funny proposition, finding humor in the experience was essential to my survival. For fat people, humor is a shield, it’s a control tactic, it’s a coping mechanism, it’s a tool for reflection and processing and a source of power — and more often than not, it’s all of those things at the same time. With that in mind, I wonder how different life would have felt if being the funny fat friend meant “funny while fat” instead of “funny because fat?”

Enter Funny Fat Friend. Created by Brooklyn-based comedian Maddie Silverstein, the show features a lineup of mostly fat performers and material that almost never includes fatness as a punchline.

Maddie Silverstein, creator of Funny Fat Friend. Photo by Lydia Hudgens.

“Very rarely do you get a lineup of all plus-size or fat people — usually there’s one or two,” Maddie tells me over coffee — in addition to being a fat comedian, she is also my friend and the only person in the history of my life who has successfully convinced me to go to Zumba. “I wanted Funny Fat Friend to be a safe space for being fat, but not necessarily talk or joke about being fat. Actually, at the last show I was the only comic who even talked about it at all.”

Silverstein initially conceived of the idea while she was living in Los Angeles, during a time in her life when she was examining her own biases.

“I grew up in a household where we were rewarded for trying to lose weight,” she says. “I hated myself, and I did not like other fat people. I was so afraid of being seen with a group of other fat people at a restaurant, and us becoming the shitty stereotype — ‘There are the fat people, eating at Chili's.’ And I don't even actually like Chili's, they don't have a lot of vegetarian options. At the time I just felt like, "People will be able to tell I’m fat. And was I able to joke about it? Yes. But was it funny? Maybe not.”

At the time, she was also reckoning with another part of her identity. We talked about about a piece I wrote a couple of years ago about the inextricable link between fatness and queerness, how you often can’t quite unlock the latter without getting clear on where you stand on the former.

“I’ve known I was queer for a long time, and I just pushed it away and tried not to understand or accept it,” she says. “But accepting it, and then surrounding myself with other fat people — and people who are fatter than me, who are having harder experiences and are truly stigmatized and marginalized — it opened up my world. It showed me the difference between what we’re told is reality, and what is actually reality.”

Maddie later moved across the country to Brooklyn, which is where Funny Fat Friend had its first show. She says Funny Fat Friend is a reclamation of stereotypes that she’d previously felt boxed into — and a subversion of how people expect fat comics to show up and perform.

“I want Funny Fat Friend to be a safe space for being fat, and if your comedy takes negative view towards your fatness, that’s not my vibe,” she says. “Self-deprecation is fine, where it’s honest — like, I have a joke I did where I did a pageant when I was younger and I won “Most Courageous,” because they didn’t have a medal that said “Fattest.” That’s funny to me — but it’s not making me the punchline. For some comics, them begin fat is the punchline, but not creatively. And it just ends up making people be like, ‘Aw’.”

Karolena Theresa during her set at Funny Fat Friend. Photo by Lydia Hudgens.

She also explained that in addition to curating a specific type of lineup (previous shows included comics like Karolena Theresa, Zubi Ahmed, Carly Kane, Obo Gilmore, Indigo Asim, and more), the Funny Fat Friend crowd — mostly fat, largely queer — is essential to creating the space she envisions. “Sometimes when I tell any joke about being fat in front of a thin audience, there’s usually at least one tipsy woman who’s like ‘You’re not fat, you’re beautiful.’ And I’m just like, you’ve missed the point. Or, I have this one joke where I’m like “I’m a plus-size model and influencer…oh, sorry, some of you might pronounce that as ‘fat bitch.’ And once there was a girl who was like, ‘You’re not that fat,” and I was like , “Well, you’re not that good at compliments’.”

I’ve been to two Funny Fat Friend shows, always held at size-inclusive vintage and plus-size clothing studio Shop Berriez in Brooklyn. Berriez is the kind of place where every fat person browsing the racks is the best-dressed human you’ve ever seen in real life, and owner Emma Zack can eyeball you from across the room and pull out the exact vintage leather you’ve been looking for, and in your size. The convergence of fatness, queerness, confidence and excellent drip is powerful in and of itself — and when you add a room full of laughter, well, let’s just say the energy is enough to undo some serious middle school trauma — or at the very least, 7th grade.

The next Funny Fat Friend is happening on March 9 at 4 p.m. at Shop Berriez in Brooklyn, hosted by Maddie Silverstein and featuring comedians Milly Tamarez, Michelladonna, Pooja Reddy, Maggie Olmsted, and Carly Kane. Buy tickets here.