The Fun of Getting Thin

A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes—one on herself and the other on her husband. Half the
comedy in the world is predicated on the paunch. At that, the human race is divided into but two classes—
fat people who are trying to get thin and thin people who are trying to get fat.
Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out the last two letters of the indictment. Fat is
fat. It isn’t any more fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it’s a darned sight more
uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin or unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin
person has the long end of it. I never was thin, so I don’t know. However, I have been fat—notice that
“have been”? And if there is any phase of human enjoyment, any part of life, any occupation, avocation,
divertissement, pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it in any regard, I failed to discover it in
the twenty years during which I looked like the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a
bale of hay.