film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

mike-and-molly.jpg

What Did One Fat Joke Say to the Other Fat Joke? Fat Joke!

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 21, 2010 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 21, 2010 |


Here’s the sole difference between “Mike & Molly,” and every other conventional, laugh track sitcom that revolves around an overweight man and his better-looking love interest: Here, the love interest is overweight, too. “Mike & Molly,” is 21 minutes of fat jokes. Billy Gardell plays Mike Biggs, an overweight cop who makes fat jokes about himself. Melissa McCarthy plays Molly Flynn, a school teacher who makes fat jokes about herself. Swoosie Kurtz plays Molly’s mother, who makes fat jokes about Molly. Katy Mixon plays Molly’s sister, who makes fat jokes about Mike and Molly. Reno Wilson plays Mike’s police partner, who makes fat jokes about Mike. Mike, in turn, makes jokes about the fact that his partner lives with his grandmother.

Not a single one of these jokes are funny.

Chuck Lorre (“Two and a Half Men,” “The Big Bang Theory”) set out to apparently make a conventional laugh-track sitcom that starred people that looked more like the average American. This is exactly what they said about “More to Love” (aka, “The Fatchelor”). And it’s what they said about Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But if you’re going to make a sitcom about real people, Lorre should probably understand better that overweight people do not spend every waking hour making fat jokes about themselves, and their friends and family don’t spend all of their time making fat jokes about them, either. From the best of my understanding, overweight people do not communicate in a secret, fat joke code.

In the opening episode, Mike and Molly meet at an overweights anonymous meeting. They hit it off in between fat jokes. In future episodes, they will extend their courtship over fat jokes. They will likely move in together. In fact, because Molly lives with two of the show’s other co-stars, Mike will probably move in with her, and be an easier target for fat jokes by simple proximity. When Chuck Lorre runs out of fat jokes, he will recycle and rephrase the same fat jokes again. This will probably happen by the third episode. Then they’ll have a kid, probably. And he’ll be fat. And they’ll extend the fat jokes to the child. And America, inexplicably, will love this show. They will eat this shit up. It will be on for the next seven years.

I refuse to watch another minute.