humor | Stowaway Travel Writing & Editorial Services

Dearest fellow travelers, let’s talk bodies and how we talk about them. Just a bit! The subject of one’s weight and beauty is fraught with social pressures, personal histories, and private traumas. I’ve talked a little about how my own fatness affects my ability to travel, and I will probably post some more about that in the future. But for today, I wanted to share my new favorite way of stopping damaging body-shaming talk in its tracks. You can use this on yourself, your friends and lovers, even casual acquaintances. Ready for this amazing secret??

Mirror, Mirror, does this dress make my face look green?

Generally, we all feel some sort of weird in our own bodies. Maybe we think we’re too fat, too skinny, too dark, too light, too too too something–we’re always some measure off of an impossible beauty standard so deeply ingrained that we almost think it’s natural. I have a lot of thoughts about that, and a lot of websites to direct you to, but despite appearances to the contrary, I don’t like to spend all my time pontificating. I have a set amount of pontificable time. The rest is spent reading Kate Atkinson novels and imagining myself into Cary Grant movies.

But just because I’m not pontificating doesn’t mean I think it’s okay for us to go around hating on our own bodies (or those of others, but that’s a whole other conversation). How do I shut down body shaming without making the person feel yelled at, or shamed, or condescended to? How can we take a moment of body shaming and turn it into a gentle reminder to love your body, without preaching? The answer: humor! (AS ALWAYS.)

My friend told me about a roommate she had who turned her world around on this one. My friend is usually comfortable with herself, but she has her bad days, as we all do. Whenever she’d get down on herself about her thighs or her hair or her skin or whatever, her roommate would look at her lasciviously and say, “Are you flirting with me right now?” in a super exaggerated way. She’d even flutter her eyelashes a little and pucker up her lips. Every single time, my friend would laugh and carry on with her day.

It’s perfect! It’s absurd and non-confrontational, while also gently pointing up the absurdity of endlessly stressing over perceived body flaws. It doesn’t offer any of the usual reassurances — “no, that doesn’t make your butt look big,” “just eat yogurt for the next week and you’ll feel so much better,” “I have a new moisturizer you should try, it only cost $3,000” — but it is reassuring nonetheless. It reassures the stressed friend that what they see as a major flaw or even minor annoyance is actually nothing at all, a triviality, a reason to relax and have a laugh. It’s like saying, “I wasn’t focusing on your body but if we’re going to, let’s enjoy it!” It takes a moment of anguish and turns it into a moment of connection and fun.

So the next time you’re despairing your love handles, or your friend is bemoaning her chest size, make a funny face and a dramatic gesture and say, “Are you flirting with me right now?” I bet you laugh and move on with your life, in that beautiful body of yours.

I’m definitely flirting with you right now

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Ladies and gentleman, I have uncovered one of the great secrets of that dark and twisted world we know as comedy. Lengthy treatises have been written on just what makes people laugh, and entire tomes are devoted to the debate over whether high-brow or low-brow humor is funnier. The answer to the latter is both, obviously, but for my money, nothing makes me laugh so instinctively and delightedly as a well-executed pratfall.

What makes a pratfall well-executed, you may ask. (As I hope you might, since this is the great secret I promised to share with you. If you did not ask, then you probably already know the secret but shh, don’t ruin it for the rest of the class.) I’m glad you asked! A pratfall can take many forms, but its basic definition is someone taking a fall in a way that makes people laugh. Someone falling down the stairs in a Lifetime movie = not funny. Someone falling down the stairs in a Three Stooges movie = funny. You hear “pratfall,” you think “banana peel.”

And that’s funny, of course it is. People falling down is inherently funny. I don’t know if it appeals to me so much because my natural grace and style manifests in tripping over invisible objects and walking into doorframes, but I love it when a casual conversation or stroll down the street on stage or in film is interrupted by a sudden slip-n-slide. Much of the humor comes from the unexpectedness of the fall (at least unexpected to the person falling), but even when we in the audience know it’s coming, we love watching the norm literally upended.

Chevy Chase takes a fall for the president

Which brings me to Chevy Chase, whose weekly (and therefore very expected) cold open pratfalls on SNL elevated the act to a whole new level. His genius? He never stopped falling down. He didn’t just trip and land on his butt. He tripped, windmilled his arms, fell on his knees, reached wildly for support from whatever was handy, took down an entire bookshelf in the process, and landed on his butt. He could fall from any height and still find something to destroy on his way down, all with the most dignified look on his face, like, “I am not falling, I am momentarily off-balance.” The dignified look is part of it; he was playing straight man to the funny man of the fall, almost making the few moments of falling into a double act starring himself and gravity.

This insight struck me as I was watching Season 1 of “Community,” in which Chevy gets to perform a couple of his patented Neverending Pratfalls(TM). He trips over an instrument in a band room, and sure enough, the entire jazz combo setup comes crashing down in a glorious rain of cymbals and drums. He trips in a dorm room with a giant bowl of popcorn in his hands, and next thing you know, he’s grasping at the door handle, the desk, anything, while popcorn rains down on him and his friends laugh hysterically. He’s still got it!

SNL and NBC in general keep a tight grip on their video content, so I was unable to find either of those “Community” clips online or some of Chevy’s more classic how-are-you-still-falling moments from the ’70s. But this clip below is still excellent, with a festive fall as performed by Gerald Ford. (For the young kids in the audience, President Ford was portrayed in the media as clumsy and kinda dim, and Chase regularly played Ford as a bumbling buffoon on SNL. This clip is no exception; we don’t get the fall til the end of the 2:30 minute video, but all the record playing and tree trimming before it is wonderful to see as set-up.)

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/christmas-eve-at-the-white-house/29163/

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