Reminder to Everyone Who Forgot This Week: Kevin James' Career Is an Embarrassment

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 29, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 29, 2023 |

What are we doing here, folks? I don’t mind that a certain Kevin James meme is going around because it’s vaguely amusing, but we’re letting the glow of that meme extend to Kevin James himself, as well as The King of Queens, a thoroughly mediocre laugh-track sitcom that ran for entirely too many seasons on CBS? Why?

It’s like America has forgotten the Paul Blart movies, Zookeeper, and Here Comes the Boom, an entire genre of Kevin James movies predicated on the belief that, if an overweight man falls, it must be funny! I’m pretty sure there is more to physical comedy than a large man falling! But don’t tell that to Kevin James, who actually wrote several of these movies. And they’re not just about overweight men but overweight, pathetic, underemployed men, who often live with their moms but who inexplicably end up with the hot woman anyway through heroic acts that often involve a large man falling!

Wven before Fat Joke: The Movie, Kevin James was in one of the most deliriously awful movies of the 2000s I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (I had to look that up twice because it’s hard for me to fathom that a movie that offensive wasn’t from the ’90s. It wasn’t. It was 2007.). In Chuck and Larry, straight characters played by Kevin James and Adam Sandler marry each other for health insurance. It was basically Gay Joke: The Movie.

But hey! We love the meme! Never mind the fact that James has been in exactly two good movies: Hitch, opposite Will Smith, and, more recently, Becky, where he plays a Nazi. Most recently — in 2022 — he was in Home Team, a Netflix movie based on the New Orleans Saints coach, Sean Payton (now coach of the pathetic Denver Broncos). Kevin James thought it’d be great to celebrate a coach who was suspended for a season because he paid out bonuses to players who injured players on other teams. The movie is actually about Sean Payton reconnecting with his kid while coaching his 6th-grade team while he was serving the suspension, again, for paying his players thousands of dollars to cripple other players to improve his team’s chances of winning, a plot point that is conveniently papered over in the otherwise family-friendly movie.

But hey! Let’s just remember Kevin James fondly for King of Queens, a television sitcom that essentially served as the blueprint for the dark parody Kevin Can F**k Himself, which is about an attractive wife who is basically trapped in life by her overweight husband who controls her through his incompetence. King of Queens was 206 episodes of Leah Remini’s character essentially being forced to live with a man who could not otherwise take care of himself. She’s hot! He’s a schlub! And there’s nothing wrong with couples with attractiveness disparities, but what was it about Doug Heffernan’s personality that closed that gap? Was it the way he’d forget her birthday and make plans to watch a UFC match and ignore her even though she’s depressed about getting older? Was it the way that he tried to get his trainer to sexually harass him to make his wife jealous? Or was it the way that Doug got stuck halfway up his attic while Everybody Loves Raymond was visiting?

And let’s not even get started on Kevin Can Wait, Kevin James’ attempt to replicate King of Queens because his film career had died. Did he bother updating the marriage tropes? No, he did not! In fact, when the ratings dipped, he unceremoniously had his wife (Erinn Hayes) killed off so that they could bring in Leah Remini! Because she wasn’t a character! She was a plot device!

And even after all that, we’re just going to continue celebrating Kevin James, huh?

“I’ll take a shot if you take a shot”

Me: pic.twitter.com/Q6FEYuiWa2

— 𝓝 (@elgueroatl) September 24, 2023