If you’ve ever seen the TV show It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, you probably walked away in hysterics or with an element of your humanity shattered. There’s no in between.
You’ll see five actors pushing every limit, social boundary and taboo subject that could come into their heads. Every passing season, they rededicate themselves to making the show more and more appalling and atrocious. In their seventh season, the bar has been set quite high (or low).
Rob McElhenney, the show’s creator and one of the lead actors, is responsible for one of its more absurd gags that would impact his personal life. McElhenney plays Mac, a self-absorbed (not unlike the other leads) degenerate who overrates his physical condition to the point where he seems convinced that he’s some level of a ninja.
This season, however, McElhenney thought it would be funny for his character to regress physically and aesthetically without losing any of the confidence he has in his ninja abilities. To pull this off, McElhenney himself put on 52 pounds between seasons.
While Mac insists he’s “harvesting mass,” McElhenney thinks his character is most effective at his most unlikable and oblivious, and this gag really reaches for the bottom. Being offensive and crossing the line is the norm for Sunny — the characters take hilarious pride in humiliating and hurting one another. And Mac has definitely done some bizarre stuff before.
One episode features the characters manipulating each other into sleeping with each other’s moms and love interests. Another involves Mac fainting as soon as he steps on the ice during the intermission of a Philadelphia Flyers game (envisioning himself doing quite the opposite while unconscious).
However, Fat Mac is more than just a gag, and an actor sacrificing his health for a joke has people actually dissecting this and asking if he’s gone too far. Is it funny to see someone deliberately harm his or her own body for the sake of laughs? I’d say it is.
While not the same kind of self-mutilation that you’d see on Jackass, McElhenney’s joke is made in terrible taste. “Fat” humour is the lowest common denominator. By making that a part of his life and his character, the denominator gets even lower. But anyone who’s offended by this over-the-top stunt is clearly missing the point of the show.
The joke isn’t pointed towards being fat or fat people in general. In Mac’s case, it’s clearly a lifestyle issue — he carries around a garbage bag of chimichangas and runs almost entirely on beer. While the show purposely lacks any redeeming lessons or character development, with the exception of the depravity of its stars, there’s still the obvious theme of trying to have as many symmetries with modern American lifestyle in their plotlines. And any similarities between Americanism and these anti-heroes is something to be improved. In this particular gag, the joke on himself is a joke on ignoramuses and narcissists.
This isn’t a Jackass level of humour. I can’t even tell if it’s a higher or lower level. While I’d say that McElhenney is using his body to make a grand statement towards ignorance, body issues and society all in one ill-advised dieting stint, he’d probably accuse me of reading into it far too deeply.
The point is, he wanted to see how far he could take his character, and this is where he’s found himself. His jolly new look shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone, much like the show itself.
— Andrew Kelly
fifth-year economics