I’ve been sitting on this post for a few weeks. I thought it would be worth finishing before the end of the holidays. Enjoy?

One of Colbert’s recent Late Show cold opens is a fake ad for Cinnabon’s pint of frosting.

In the sketch, people at a loss of what left to do to survive the boredom and isolation of the pandemic are seen eating the frosting out of the carton (which is clearly some kind of vanilla yogurt). They are sad. One of them is crying in a bathtub. The announcer’s message is: “give up”. I have some thoughts.

First off there seems to be more than one premise. Are they lampooning big fast food for (literally) capitalizing on people’s anxiety and desperation at the expense of their health, while not helping us solve our actual problems? Or are they fueling the entrenched societal narrative of shame about overeating as if due to weakness? Even if the writers mean to fault the corporations, if the sketch still requires us to agree that binge- or stress-eating processed food is a sign failure, weakness, or lack of control, then I think the joke is not worth making. At the very least, the joke should be better crafted, more on target. I see that the main joke of the Colbert clip is that Cinnabon’s rollout of their signature frosting is a reflection of the state of everyone’s pandemic stress and boredom. It’s not really trying to fault individual consumers OR Cinnabon. It’s more of a suggestion that this is the natural, logical conclusion of a months-long life disruption that’s now spilling out into the winter holidays.

… However, it’s difficult for me to give them the benefit of the doubt, since (goodness, I did NOT want to get into this but here we go) Colbert’s Late Show writers have a history of making jokes about stress eating. They make like… a lot of them. Stephen himself has a long history of doing these bits where he feigns sadness or panic and then digs into some ice cream for relief. A few times he’ll even lament “I’m fat” in a sort of “teen girl seeks support after a break up” bit. And I haven’t even mentioned the many times he takes a passing jab at his own appearance; he tends to view his average amount of athleticism, muscle, and fat as evidence that he’s undisciplined, unaccomplished, and generally not manly (all in spite of the fact that Colbert is a very rich and successful actor). He and his team also write fat jokes about Republicans (most notably Christie and Trump) that draw on stereotypes you can leverage against ANY fat person.

Liberals need to know better than to make arguments that rely on fat stigma, and they should know that, while internalized fat bias is a fact of life, it is a part of the personal-responsibility narrative that lets institutions off the hook and is demonstrably false. It’s hazardous to make jokes that acknowledge how we feel about fat and food, and yet not challenge it.

Happy Holidays

P.S.: I’m only upset because I care about you, Stephen.