enough with the fat jokes on 'drag race'
they're cruel—and boring, which is perhaps the biggest sin of all
Despite me having a zillion Very Serious stories in the works, I got mad after watching an episode of RPDR and here we are. I am a full-time freelance writer and paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to continue to do work like this, as well as pay an editor to help me with them. You can upgrade here:
I’ve started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race this season after a many-seasons-long hiatus, mostly because my TikTok FYP would not stop serving me up videos of Boston queen Kori King doing deranged Cameos. When the video of her lip sync battle against her showmance partner, Lydia B. Kollins, hit my feed—which ended with the pair making out to the song “Kiss Me Deadly”—I decided I would tune in.
I’ve not been wow-ed by the queens as a whole this season (and even struggled to tell several of them apart for the first SEVERAL episodes), but I’ve at least been enjoying the fact that these girls are here for the drama. They’ve been at each other’s throats since the second episode, and I am here for it. That drama really came to a head on the tenth episode of the season, where the maxi challenge of the week was the “Villains Roast.”
The drama between the queens was juicy, but I couldn’t get past the roast itself. The queens were asked to roast three “villains” from Drag Race’s past: Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Plane Jane, and Kandy Muse. There will always be girls who will bomb on challenges like this because not everyone can be a comedy queen. But what bothered me the most was the sheer number of jokes—from queens that were “funny” and queens that were “bombing”—that were fat jokes. And I want to talk about it.1
Two of the three villains who came to be roasted—Mistress Isabelle Brooks and Kandy Muse—are fat. Of the eight season 17 queens left in the competition at this point, none of them are fat and the majority of them are very young twinks. Seven of them made jokes about Mistress and Kandy’s size2—some of them even said, “I’m not going to make a fat joke…” and then proceeded to make a fat joke3, which demonstrated that they knew somewhere that those jokes are low-hanging fruit that they should really be avoiding.
And yet.
Unfortunately, fatness is really one of the last “acceptable” -isms to make jokes about in the drag world. Drag queens have long been known for having irreverent humor and many have not always been particularly concerned with being PC. It’s why RuPaul (used to?) introduce the season’s “reading” challenge with the line, “In the grand tradition of Paris is Burning…” to give the (largely cishet) audience at home the cultural context to understand what they were about to watch. But audience matters. Jokes you can get away with when you’re on stage in a gay club, among community where it’s all an in-joke and a wink-wink, are not the same jokes you can get away with on national television.
Within the drag community, you can read a fellow queen on their biggest vulnerabilities, but only when it comes from a place of deep respect and a long history together. That kind of context is crucial because it means the subject of the joke is in on it. It’s why I’m not going to say that fat jokes are never acceptable4. But when the jokes come from thin queens who have never met these fat queens, and the entire joke is “you’re fat?” Absolutely not.
The “villains” showed up knowing they were going to be roasted, so they’re prepared to be mocked and insulted and that’s part of what they signed up for. Fat queens know that there will be at least a few jokes aimed at them that have to do with their size. But it got so bad and so repetitive that both Mistress and Kandy said something during the roast.
After one of the queens directed the third fat joke of her set at Kandy Muse, Kandy said, “not too much now.” She said it in a way that if you didn’t know better, she was just giving it back. But if you actually pay attention, it was a warning. She looks furious—and she should have been. By the time the sixth queen, Sam Star, ended her set with a joke directed at Mistress Isabelle Brooks in which she said, “Bless your heart… disease,” Mistress shot back, “One more fat joke and I’mma lose it.” As she should have!
This has been an issue before on the show. On season 13’s “Nice Girls Roast,” Utica made so many cruel fat jokes towards guest judge Loni Love, regular judges Michelle Visage and Ross Matthews, and visiting queen Nina West that she had to issue an apology after her elimination. That should have been the end of this kind of humor on the Drag Race stage, yet here we are.
If you can’t make jokes about something other than the size of someone’s body, you’re not actually funny.
Not only that, what’s so funny about the fact that someone is big? As a comedian, you should really interrogate the punchline—being fat is a neutral statement of fact. There’s nothing inherently funny about it unless you think that someone deserves to be mocked for it, which is the whole point of a roast. And if you think fatness is something that you can make fun of someone for possessing, that means you think being fat is something negative.
Let’s not forget that drag is art and drag is performance, but doing drag on a level that qualifies you to compete on Drag Race is also a physical feat. You are punishing your body, risking injury, needing to have stamina to be on stage for long periods of time, have to be able to learn choreography, and practice until you get it right. Any queen who has competed on this program, and who is considered legendary enough for the show to bring back for a guest appearance that an entire challenge is centered around, is an athlete, baby5. Yes, they’re fat. It clearly hasn’t stopped them from succeeding at the highest level of their craft.
To quote RuPaul, “And what?”
Fatphobia is obviously a societal problem, and it’s not one that the queer community is immune from (and while it looks different in sapphic spaces and gay male spaces, it exists in both). Especially for queens who are thin and whose drag relies on their looks and body (ody ody), they need to be aware of their positionality.
Big girls are often shoe-horned into being comedy queens because it’s the only role available to them—it’s okay if you’re fat, as long as you’re funny. When a skinny-mini queen gets up there and the only joke they can make about a plus-sized queen hinges on the fact that she’s *ba-dum-ching* fat! it’s insulting to those queens not just because the material is punching down. It’s insulting because a big queen could never get away with such lackluster humor and still be cast on Drag Race.
But especially if we are talking about Drag Race, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of drag performance and competition, I would really have to hope that the queens who are being cast are above making these kinds of jokes. They’re cruel, but worse than that, they’re unoriginal, unimaginative, and uninspired—the exact opposite of what good drag should be.
So before someone gets up there and wants to make a joke about the fat queen being lazy (or something else equally tired), maybe they should pause and wonder if it’s their drag that’s lazy, girl. And that’s the T.
I’m embedding video of the roast for those that want to watch it but I’m putting a major content note on it for fatphobia. I’m fully serious that I’m not even that sensitive of a person and I found this segment nearly unwatchable.
Onya Nurve was the only queen who made no fat jokes during her set.
The joke was literally, “I’m not going to make a fat joke about Mistress… because Mistress is already a fat joke.”
Ngl, I kind of liked Lydia’s joke, “I’m a big fan… is what Mistress would say if she was dressed as an oscillating fan.”
Yes, I can make anything sports.
Thank you for writing this. Especially in an environment known for witty repartee, it does feel extra shocking to witness otherwise clever people rely on the laziest jokes in the book. Maybe there's a mental experiment people could try before delivering one of these lines—something like, "would a straight white male stand-up comic from 1995 make this kind of joke about a woman he didn't like?" If so, maybe I need to work a little harder on my material!
It's also a reminder that while many prejudices have been steadily declining (at a population level) over the past few decades, anti-fat bias has only increased. We have a lot of work to do.
This season is so dull and uninspired for me. I think this one-dimensional roast is one of many consequences of casting solely inexperienced children, some of whom seem to have the sole talent of being skinny.
One of the things I love about Traitors, I realized, is that all the players are (ostensibly) adults, and I would love to see a drag race season soon with similar age demographics.