Funny Jim Gaffigan Hulu Special Breaks the ‘Skinny’ Comic Curse
It’s a little shocking when Jim Gaffigan walks out on stage for his new Hularious stand-up special, The Skinny. The reason: Gaffigan is, well, skinny. Shockingly so, like down-50-pounds skinny. And the secret behind his weight loss isn’t what you’re thinking, which he says right at the top: He’s not on Ozempic. “I’m on a different one,” he clarifies. “I’m on Mounjaro, which is better because it sounds like an Italian restaurant.”
Gaffigan spends the first 10 minutes of The Skinny getting real about his weight loss, including the knowledge that it might be temporary. While his doctor recommended the appetite suppressant to prevent future health problems, Gaffigan is keeping his “fat clothes” for the inevitable slide.
He’s also aware of the drawbacks of such medications, replacing self-discipline, exercise and healthy eating with “a weekly shot that killed all the passion inside of me.” Now, like other thin people, Gaffigan is enjoying the benefits of being dead inside.
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Unfair or not, it can be disconcerting to comedy fans when formerly husky funny people lose weight. We’ve been down this road before, with Jonah Hill, Roseanne Barr, Drew Carey and John Goodman, to name just a few. In fact, only a few days ago, TMZ caught up with Seinfeld's Wayne Knight, who claimed dropping 100-plus pounds cost him acting jobs.
“Losing weight can be the ultimate comedic curse if you have established yourself as a fat comedian. Once we create our images of famous people and actors, we don’t like those images to change or to be challenged,” human behavior expert Patrick Wanis told FOX411. “John Goodman and Drew Carey lost weight and lost our attention because we had already embedded in our mind, our association with their old image as the funny fat guy. John Candy and the character he portrays in the movie Uncle Buck is the epitome – so warm and funny that you want to run up and hug him.”
Candy, of course, probably isn’t the best example, dying of heart failure at age 43. The extra weight didn’t help. But maintaining a “funny” weight is on the minds of at least some comic actors. Chris Farley’s brother Tom told The New York Times Chris feared that shedding pounds would “take his edge away.”
Tom Arnold told Salon the same thing. “It’s the same mistake people make about when comedians quit drugs,” he explained. “They think that when people lose weight, they won’t be funny.”
Weight loss can’t help but affect the jokes. “It is possible that a comic’s self-image as a heavy person was formed during the same time the act was formed, and consequently weight loss becomes a similar topic,” argued Jamie Masada, owner of The Laugh Factory. “A heavy person who used his or her weight as a topic of humor can either ditch weight from the act or comment on how the loss of weight had an impact.”
Seeing as Gaffigan had a best-selling book called Dad Is Fat, he has little choice but to make his evolving body a part of his act, at least for now. “I’m trying to enjoy being thin because I know I’m going to be fat again,” he half-jokes in his new special. “This is not sustainable. This is 99 percent Big Pharma, 1 percent Little Jim.”
