Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle — The Beauty of Being Homely (1921) 🇺🇸

I am fat — and nobody loves a fat man. And whatever beauty I have is wholly an inner beauty— a beauty of soul rather than a beauty of line. For fat men DO have souls, and things.

by Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle

But being fat and homely has its compensations, even though the business of reducing weight has become the country’s fifth largest industry.

For instance, people laugh at you when you’re fat. They do me. In fact, last year they laughed several thousand dollars’ worth at me. The proverb says, “Laugh and be fat.” I say, “Be fat, and laugh!” Ha! Ha!

But mere pelf is, as the fellow says, nothing. There are bigger things in life than money. You’d appreciate that if you were fat.

You see, when you’re fat and homely nobody ever asks you to pose for a collar advertisement. You don’t get any request to indorse the latest eyebrow wash, or form-fitting sport suits. Nobody asks you if you’d rather make love in the moonlight than in features. In fact, you’re free from mankinds of annoyances.

And in the last reel of your pictures, when the poor harassed heroine is looking around for a place to lay her weary head, what is more natural than that she should turn to the ample bosom of our hero? Nothing is more natural, is my retort. Many a feminine head has come to roost on my manly shoulders, while I have beamed blissfully and the jealous birds out in the audience have ground their teeth and sighed, “The lucky stiff!”

Of course, there’s such a thing as being too fat. When a man gets up around 400 pounds or so, and the back of his coat looks like the big top of Barnum & Bailey’s circus then, I feel, he is putting on flesh, and should think of dieting. But up to 400 pounds a chap can be looked upon as a broth of a boy, who will grow up to be a help to his folks.

And take my face. Now it’s a pretty good old face, as faces go. It has stuck to me through many years, and I feel rather friendly toward it. Of course, it hasn’t the chiselled beauty of an Apollo Belvidere, even though it has the cleanliness of Apollo Soap. It’s hardly a face that would launch a thousand ships but who the deuce wants that kind of a face anyway. Look at the mess the Shipping Board’s in already. If I launched another thousand ships with my face it would knock the shipping situation cuckoo. And think what it would do to my face.

A lot of unthinking people laugh at my face. They didn’t know I heard them laugh, but I did, because I was hidden away in the back of the theatre. But strange as it may seem. I didn’t feel a bit hurt when they laughed. In fact. I rather liked the idea.

Laughs to me sound like the jingle of the cash register.

Oh, it’s not so hard to be fat and homely.

[a]

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His [Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle] morning exercise

Collection: Pantomime Magazine, September 1921