Celebrity Studies

ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20

Class, corpulence, and neoliberal citizenship:

Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live
Russell Meeuf
To cite this article: Russell Meeuf (2015): Class, corpulence, and neoliberal citizenship: Melissa
McCarthy on Saturday Night Live, Celebrity Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2015.1044758
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1044758

Published online: 02 Jun 2015.

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Date: 04 November 2015, At: 11:03

Celebrity Studies, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1044758

Class, corpulence, and neoliberal citizenship: Melissa McCarthy on

Saturday Night Live
Russell Meeuf*
School of Journalism and Mass Media, University of Idaho, 875 Perimeter Drive MS 3178,
Moscow, ID 83844-3178, USA

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 11:03 04 November 2015

(Received 22 August 2014; accepted 18 April 2015)

Examining Melissa McCarthys performances as host of Saturday Night Live, this
paper demonstrates how stereotypes of low social class are used to manage the
seeming contradictions of obesity within contemporary US media culture. Despite
the so-called obesity epidemic in which obesity signifies moral and social decay
body image heroines such as the plus-sized McCarthy offer uplifting narratives of selfconfidence and self-acceptance. These contradictory impulses, however, are simply
two complementary modes of neoliberal self-governance, offering different forms of
cultural citizenship based on self-transformation and self-promotion. McCarthys stardom reveals the role that social class plays in managing these neoliberal trajectories.
McCarthys comic performances rely heavily on caricatures of vulgar, low-class
obesity, and yet her public persona is that of a polite, middle-class everywoman. In
this way, McCarthys persona indicates how the stereotypes of the obesity epidemic
can be appropriated by middle-class audiences as indicators of confidence within the
regime of neoliberal self-actualisation.
Keywords: obesity; neoliberalism; Saturday Night Live; gender studies; social class

Introduction
In a review of the Melissa McCarthy comedy Identity Thief (2013), film critic Rex Reed
(2013) called McCarthy tractor sized and a hippo, prompting a wave of media furore
directed against the prominent critic for demeaning the actress. Fellow critic Richard
Roeper condemned Reeds mean-spirited name-calling (Chen 2013), and the incident
became so well known that Oscar host Seth Macfarlane even made a joke about Reed at
that years ceremony.
Instead of a well-publicised apology (the routine response to public shaming in
todays celebrity culture), Reed doubled down on his comments. He told Us Weekly that
he stands by his review, deploying the logic of the so-called obesity epidemic to
rationalise his rant about the actress:
I object to the disgusting attempt to pretend obesity is funny. It is not remotely humorous,
and every obese comedian who ever made jokes about the disease are now dead from strokes,
heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. I stand by all of my original remarks
about Melissa McCarthys obesity, which I consider about as amusing as cancer, and
apologize for nothing. (Chen 2013)

*Email: rmeeuf@uidaho.edu
2015 Taylor & Francis

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After Reeds non-apology, the uproar effectively died down.

The McCarthy/Rex Reed brouhaha reflects a tension within contemporary media
culture. On the one hand, increased media attention to the obesity epidemic in the
USA has given a new, medical rationale to the long-standing practice of fat-shaming
(calling attention to and degrading celebrities mostly women for being or becoming
overweight). As obesity continues to be treated as cause for public concern in the mainstream media, coverage of this epidemic stigmatises obesity as a moral failing warranting public scorn. Reed thus feels comfortable using an increased risk of diabetes to call
someone a hippo.
On the other hand, entertainment journalism and popular culture have also become
increasingly attuned to feminist critiques of media and body image. Popular websites such
as Jezebel, among other media sources, frequently critique popular medias cult of thinness,
exposing the Photoshopping practices of fashion magazines and promoting the need for a
variety of body shapes and sizes in the media. Such critiques often make their way into
mainstream news and entertainment media, as did the outrage over Reeds comments about
McCarthy, which was covered by Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and a host of other news
outlets. Despite the fact that celebrity media coverage has been (and in many cases continues
to be) one of the major sources of fat-shaming and the cultures obsession with celebrity
thinness, the general cultural acceptance that the media promotes negative body images has
led to contradictory narratives about obese bodies: they are signs of individual failure that
must be disciplined into conformity, but overtly stigmatising and mocking them contradicts
discourses of inclusivity, acceptance, and female empowerment.
These two cultural impulses collide and yet are contained within the figure of
McCarthy. As a celebrity who has come to embody overweight femininity in the contemporary USA more than any other celebrity (even Oprah, whose visibility and resonance has faded in recent years), McCarthy bears an inordinate variety of cultural
meanings, signifying discourses of fat-acceptance and the normalisation of overweight
femininity while also offering an image of out-of-control feminine excess that
threatens the very fabric of bourgeoisie society. On her CBS sitcom Mike and Molly
(2010present), her performances address the day-to-day challenges faced by a lovable
obese couple, while her film roles frequently portray her as a sex-crazed and often violent
weirdo, from shitting in a sink in Bridesmaids (2011) to repeatedly punching Jason
Bateman in the neck in Identity Thief (2013). She is a glamorous figure on the cover of
Elle, but in one of her most popular Saturday Night Live (SNL) (2011, 2013, 2014)
sketches she blasts an entire container of Hidden Valley Ranch onto her face while
wearing a Mr Spock sweatshirt.
McCarthys contradictions mirror the contradictions of obesity in the USA, where fatshaming is big business on tabloid covers and on television programmes such as The Biggest
Loser (2004present), but where a bevy of discourses from soap adverts to Meghan Trainors
2014 hit All about that Bass insist that inner beauty and self-confidence are more important
than thinness. Celebrity media announces which female stars have put on too much weight to
wear bikinis on supermarket stands across the country, and yet stars like Gabourey Sidibe,
Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy and others are celebrated for challenging Hollywoods cult of
thinness.
Following Dyers semiotic approach to stardom, this article explores how McCarthys
celebrity reflects these cultural contradictions and yet assuages them at the same time. Seeing
stars as a vast collection of images, narratives, and discourses a star text Dyer (1979)
suggests that the meanings of all celebrities are contradictory, fragmentary, and full of
tensions, reflecting the schisms and contradictions of competing ideological frameworks in

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Celebrity Studies

a particular historical moment. Stars resonate, in other words, precisely because they embody
contradictions and anxieties that get lost behind the veneer of the complete individual.
McCarthys star text, then, reflects different, competing visions of corpulence: on screen,
she is most often an out-of-control, trashy model of vulgar excess who embodies all of US
cultures stereotypes about obesity; off screen, she is a sweet, classy (at times elegant) mom
who offers platitudes about self-acceptance. McCarthys celebrity displays all the tensions of
obesity, self-discipline, and female empowerment circulating and competing within US media
culture.
McCarthys star text, however, is not simply a collection of different cultural
trajectories regarding weight and the female body rather, the contours of McCarthys
public image provide a kind of map for the very boundaries of cultural citizenship in a
neoliberal world when it comes to obesity, femininity, and self-transformation.
Neoliberalism, of course, refers to a set of economic and policy assumptions that has
ascended globally since the 1970s. In contrast to the liberal nation-state that supports its
citizens through social welfare programmes, neoliberalism has encouraged the shifting of
responsibility away from government programmes and toward individuals acting on the
free market. Promoting privatisation over state control, neoliberalism has impacted a
variety of programmes and institutions central to economic mobility, from the slashing
of welfare programmes to rolling back consumer protection regulations. The dominance
of neoliberal policy has been met with significant resistance recently from the Podemos
movement in Spain and the Indignant Citizens Movement in Greece challenging neoliberal imperatives for budget austerity that slash government services, to the Occupy Wall
Street movement in the USA which has increased public discourse on class inequality and
the government policies that maintain such inequality but the assumptions of neoliberalism remain powerful in US and global politics.
The rise of neoliberalism, however, impacts not just economic policy but the culture of
individualism and consumerism in an increasingly privatised world. Neoliberalism promotes not only a model of citizenship as consumerism (privileging the choices of
individuals on the private market over the ability of the state to provide support) but
also a model of individualism based on adaptability and self-transformation. It is now the
individuals responsibility to adapt to changing market conditions, constantly remaking
their skills, habits, and even identities to meet the shifting demands of the economy. Even
beyond the economy, individual identity in the age of neoliberalism increasingly revolves
around projects of self-improvement, self-promotion, and the constant disciplining of
ones identity. Thus, as Raisborough (2011) explains, the rise of lifestyle media
media organised around individual transformation and self-improvement such as selfhelp books or makeover TV shows has ballooned in the era of neoliberalism.
Referencing Foucaults later work on governance as central to this phenomenon,
Raisborough argues that an ethos of transformation and re-creation permeates most,
if not all, aspects of our daily life and organization (2011, p. 7). But far from a neutral
vision of betterment, these transformations tend to police the boundaries of race, class,
gender, sexuality, and ability, often providing explicit lessons on how to design out
exterior markers of inequality, whether through physical appearance, fashion, behaviour,
or the appearance of ones home (Raisborough 2011).
This model of consumer citizenship and self-transformation has yielded more
pronounced anxieties about the concept of citizenship itself within neoliberalism. The
transition to individual responsibility on the free market, in theory, should make the
concept of citizenship outmoded, a relic of liberal nation-states as they systematise who
is eligible for state support and benefits (rather than simply allowing individuals to

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participate in the free market). As the liberal nation-state slowly erodes in a world of
neoliberal privatisation, however, questions of citizenship and cultural belonging have
intensified in the USA and abroad (Wingard 2013). If neoliberal citizenship can be
practiced through consumption (or exploitation) on the free market rather than being
defined by the state, what are the new boundaries of national identity and cultural
belonging? What others are acceptable to the fabric of a multicultural neoliberalism
and what other-others (Ahmed 2000) must be excluded from cultural citizenship?
What bodies are marked as dangerous threats to the economy and society and what
bodies are acceptable as participants in free exchange?1
At stake in the celebrity of Melissa McCarthy, then, are these boundaries of inclusion
and citizenship: what kinds of bodies are dangerous and must be reshaped (literally) in
order to embody responsible citizenship and what bodies are appropriate as sites of selfconfidence and inner beauty? The discourses of the obesity epidemic in US media
increasingly show weight gain to be not only a sign of poor health but a social concern,
with overweight individuals constructed as a drain on the nations resources and a sign of
national, moral failure. Media images of obesity, then, must navigate this cultural landscape, representing some overweight bodies as needing shame and self-discipline and
others as appropriate models of female empowerment.
McCarthys celebrity provides a map to this landscape by deploying the imagery and
stereotypes of social class to mark the boundaries of cultural citizenship for corpulent, female
bodies. Analysing McCarthys three turns as host of SNL, this paper shows that markers of
social class manage the meanings and implications of McCarthys excessive, exuberant, and
transgressive performances on the show. After all, McCarthys most resonant comic performances are defined not only by violence, swearing, and hyper-sexuality but also by excessive
markers of low social class and bad taste, from the bowling shirt-clad Megan in Bridesmaids
to Dianes permed bouffant in Identity Thief. In fact, almost all of McCarthys SNL characters
are shrouded in the paraphernalia of lower class stereotypes: bad perms or stringy hair,
horribly tacky glasses, and shabby, ill-fitting clothes. When her performances on the show
are at their most over the top (in terms of sex, violence, or gluttony), her costuming relies on an
equally excessive vision of tackiness and lack of good taste. McCarthys humour has
become synonymous with not only raunchy transgression but trashiness and the flouting of
middle-class respectability.
Or at least she has proven adept at performing obese trashiness. By contrast,
McCarthys authentic self as seen in the monologues on SNL is humble, wellspoken, lovable, and classy. This real McCarthy provides an uplifting affirmation that
the culture can accept an overweight woman as a movie star, obscuring and diminishing the stigmatising class and body politics of her over-the-top performances of crass
obesity.
A failure to recognise this distinction between McCarthys off-screen lovability and
on-screen trashiness seems to have been Rex Reeds biggest mistake. While it was easy
for the media to castigate the critic for his nasty insults to McCarthys size, Reeds real
transgression was suggesting that McCarthy herself is as crass as the characters she
plays. When he targeted McCarthy claiming that she is a gimmick comedian who
has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success he
collapsed this important distinction in her star persona (Reed 2013). The image of
McCarthy as an icon of middle-class fat-acceptance must function in tandem with her
onscreen trashiness in order to manage the boundaries of overweight citizenship in our
neoliberal world.

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The overweight, female celebrity in the obesity epidemic era

After more than a decade of small, supporting roles most notably as the loveable chef
Sookie St James on Gilmore Girls (20002007) McCarthy broke through to film and
television stardom with her casting in CBS Mike and Molly (2010) and her widely
celebrated performance in the comedy Bridesmaids (2011). The success of Bridesmaids
(2011) helped her land starring roles in films that put women characters in traditionally
male genres: Identity Thief (2013), a road movie; and The Heat (2013), a buddy cop film
co-starring Sandra Bullock. After cameos in Judd Apatows This is 40 (2012) and the
blockbuster comedy The Hangover III (2013), McCarthy starred in two films in 2014
Tammy (2014), directed by her husband, Ben Falcone; and St Vincent (2014) alongside
Bill Murray. She has also reunited with Bridesmaids director Paul Feig for summer 2015s
comedy Spy (2015) and is slated to be part of a forthcoming all-female Ghostbusters
reboot.
Her success quickly led to three hosting jobs on SNL in 2011, 2013, and 2014, the first
of which garnered her an Emmy nomination for outstanding guest actress in a comedy
series. This swift rise to fame has made McCarthy the most visible and popular overweight actress in Hollywood today.
McCarthy, of course, is not the first corpulent woman to achieve success as a comedian in
Hollywood. Her performance of outspoken and often crass femininity reiterates the success of
Roseanne Barr Arnold in the 1990s (known popularly as only Roseanne), whose star
persona revolved around her representation of overweight, working-class femininity.
Roseannes persistent flouting of bourgeois cultural norms regarding femininity her weight,
her unkempt home on her sitcom, her mockery of men in power led Kathleen Rowe Karlyn
(1995) to describe her as an unruly woman, a figure drawn from Bakhtins analysis of the
carnivalesque. The unruly woman defies patriarchal authority by being everything that
respectable women are not: loud, abrasive, large, and out of control. In her long-running
sitcom Roseanne (19881997), Roseannes large figure, social class, and wise-cracking
persona made legible a vision of femininity not often seen in entertainment media:
a fat woman who is sexually normal; a sloppy housewife who is also a good mother; a loose
woman who is tidy, who hates matrimony but loves her husband, and who can mock the
ideology of true womanhood yet consider herself a Domestic Goddess. (Rowe Karlyn 1995,
p. 91)

These challenges to traditional definitions of womanhood made Roseanne both popular

and reviled, especially in the tabloids and other entertainment media, where she was often
presented as overpowering and a threat to normal femininity.
In the years since Roseannes cultural prominence peaked, the USA has seen an
intensification in the cultural concern with obesity, as a so-called obesity epidemic has
occupied the attention of policy-makers and the national media. News reports are constantly reminding the public that rates of obesity in the USA are on the rise while
emphasising the individual and social costs of being overweight. First Lady Michelle
Obama even made childhood obesity and healthy eating the centrepiece of her time in the
White House, signalling not only the widespread acceptance of a crisis narrative but also
insisting that a solution can be found in individual, not structural, changes: personal eating
habits, exercise, and lifestyle.
Boero (2013) argues that the media has helped construct the obesity epidemic as a
moral panic in the USA, transforming a complex social phenomenon whose causes and
effects are still under scrutiny into a site of social panic about individual health.2 Boeros

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book Killer Fat details the creation and perpetuation of this epidemic in news media,
public health policy, medical discourse, and the diet industry, each bolstering a massive
weight-loss and self-help culture that has not only produced trillions in revenue but has
helped shape the insistent belief that body shape and size is an external reflection of
individual, psychological factors. Suggesting that individuals willingness to submit
themselves to regimes of self-discipline and self-improvement is vital to the social
order, the logic of the obesity epidemic stipulates that individual failures to conform
to dominant ideals (of health, beauty, normalcy) reflect social malaise in addition to
personal, moral failures. Within this neoliberal view of the body, consumption of
weight-loss goods and services is the only responsible way to discipline ones body and
save US society from the dangers of overweight bodes.
Even more so than when Roseanne graced the airwaves in the 1990s, the image of an
overweight woman in the media signals the moral degradation of US culture and the
imperative to discipline and control that body, bolstered by medical discourse and policy
prognostications that rationalise the fear of obesity. So why was Roseanne an object of
fear and derision in the early 1990s while McCarthy Rex Reeds objections aside is
well on her way to becoming one of Americas sweethearts?
Ironically, the intensification of the obesity epidemic narrative in recent years
coincided with a wider cultural acceptance of feminist media critiques of body image.
Even the mainstream media today readily acknowledges the popular narrative that
Hollywoods obsession with thinness may be related to body image disorders such as
anorexia and bulimia, despite the fact that the same media outlets still engage in fatshaming coverage of female celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Simpson, Lady
Gaga and others. Celebrities such as McCarthy, Lena Dunham, Queen Latifah, Gabourey
Sidibe and others frequently provide entertainment journalists with feel-good narratives
that demonstrate how progressive Hollywood casting can be. Fashion magazines, moreover, with their Photoshopping practices and pole-thin models, often function as the easy
scapegoat for the evils of media beauty standards. In fact, after the Rex Reed incident,
McCarthy again found herself at the centre of a media and beauty standards scandal as
critics at first lauded the fashion magazine Elle for including McCarthy on the cover of
their Women in Hollywood edition, only to publically shame the magazine for outfitting
McCarthy with a loose-fitting jacket that hid the curves of her body (Thomas 2013).
The mainstream acceptance of such feminist media critiques can also be seen in the
Dove True Beauty campaign, in which a massive line of beauty products bases their
advertising around sentimental images that urge women to accept their bodies just the way
they are instead of trying to look like fashion models. As more and more news organisations include uplifting stories about plus-size models, the satirical news site The Onion
was quick to mock the self-congratulatory trend, publishing its own slideshow of plus-size
models with captions such as: Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. We are goddamn
saints for recognizing that and making a slideshow about it (The Onion 2013).
McCarthy herself has come to embody this trend, acting as a body image heroine.
Especially on the cover of womens magazines, she is touted as a self-confidence guru. On
Good Housekeepings cover, McCarthy tells us that Its whats inside that counts! Ladies
Home Journal promises instructions for loving who you are, and her image on Mores
cover assures the reader of the power of being yourself. These images of McCarthy
promote her as a likeable, ordinary (i.e. middle class and white), plus-sized woman
whose fame affirms every heart-warming platitude about self-confidence and inner beauty.
Contemporary media, then, spends half its time telling overweight individuals to
discipline their bodies into conformity and the other half maintaining that self-confidence

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and inner beauty will triumph, as it did for Melissa McCarthy and other body image
heroines. The key to deciding what message is appropriate for what populations seems to
be social class. After all, one of the key ways in which images of obesity are linked to
moral and cultural degradation is through appeals to low social class visual markers of
trashiness or bad taste often function as shorthand for the shame of obesity. In order to
signify the horrors of obesity, overweight bodies in the media tend to be associated with
working-class culture and its stereotypes: for example, tacky clothes, slovenly appearance,
and fast food (Puhl, Peterson, et al. 2013). To signify that the epidemic is a kind of
regression in the human species, many images and narratives of obesity depict it as a kind
of backslide into trashy class values (see Whites [2013] discussion of evolution images
and obesity).
This definition of social class is based on Bourdieus (1984) foundational understanding of taste (in clothes, music, food, etc.) as a key means of marking and maintaining
class divisions. Particularly important in this context are markers of exterior appearance
hairstyle, fashion, make-up as a means of policing the boundaries between highbrow
(the styles associated with the economic elite, including high fashion), middle-class
(bourgeois styles based around respectability, professionalism, and traditional gender
norms), and lower- and working-class values (styles often defined by being too loud,
too crass, too racialised, or too redneck). These boundaries help reify economic inequalities and perpetuate class antagonism, as is the case with the category of white trash as a
subset of working-class values. As Newitz and Wray (1997) explain, the ascendance of
white trash as a cultural category uses markers of taste (usually stereotypes about trailer
parks and tacky fashion) to give a racial inflection to the overlapping of whiteness and
poverty: by challenging cultural associations between whiteness and economic prosperity,
poor whites are constructed as not quite white. The cultural stigmas against white trash
also obscure systems of class inequality poor whites are poor not because of economic
policies that stifle opportunity among the working class but because they are cultural
Others who refuse to transform themselves according to dominant values and norms.
As this suggests, racial anxieties are almost always central to the negotiation of social class
in the USA, especially in the context of obesity. Research on images of obesity in news media
shows that images of African American women evoke higher levels of disdain and anti-fat
bias than images of obesity in any other category (Puhl, Luedicke et al. 2013). Moreover, the
moral panic over obesity in US media has only intensified stigma against overweight black
bodies, marking them as objects of revulsion and deploying their images to signify the horrors
of low social class. The colour-blind rhetoric of the anti-obesity movement posits a seemingly
universal notion of health as the marker of responsible citizenship, but the use of bodies of
colour to signify the degradation of obesity in pop culture suggests that the rhetoric of health
masks the governance of white, middle-class cultural values. As Stoneman (2012, p. 200)
argues, the intersection of the war on obesity with a continuing class antagonism toward
racialized ethnic others is a consequential part of understanding the construction of the
normatively healthy body, harnessed as it is to a privileged notion of whiteness. The
trashiness of white obesity in the popular imagination, then, is deeply tied to anxieties
about the borders of whiteness itself.
The scandals that plagued pop star Brittany Spears in 2007 and her subsequent
comeback provide a telling example of these dynamics between weight gain, social
class, and whiteness. As Weber (2012) astutely teases out, the media discourses surrounding Spears antics wove together issues of weight gain, sanity, and social class in
describing the pop icons fall from grace. Spears weight gain of around 2040 pounds
came to signify an unstable psyche and a supposed backslide into her white trash,

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Southern roots, questioning her embodiment of middle-class whiteness. For Weber, this
indicates that the thin body is always one step closer to a Western ideal of empowered
rational individualism and increasing class mobility (2012, p. 3).
Thus one of the most popular phases of the weight loss show The Biggest Loser and
other individual transformation shows is the makeover episode, where contestants can
demonstrate their newfound control over their bodies by being brought into the fold of
middle-class style and attire. The kinds of self-transformation dictated by neoliberal
culture are not limited to the numbers on the scale the physical transformation of the
body must be constructed as a fundamental, psychological transformation of individual
identity itself, with the weight loss and external appearance seen as a reflection of the
contestants internal discipline and self-acceptance. Far from an ideological neutral vision
of a healthy psychology, the contestants initiation into middle-class taste and appearance aligns a normal outlook on ones body and lifestyle with white, bourgeois values
and sensibilities. The audience cannot be assured that the contestant has really changed
until they don the habiliments of bourgeois fashion.
Given this fear of obesity as trashiness, it is not surprising that the media discourses of
fat-acceptance are securely middle and upper-middle class (and generally white) in their
imagery and outlook. Lena Dunhams body (she is often described as being chubby) has
made her the new darling of feminist body image critiques, but such critiques are
acceptable because Dunham is firmly rooted in privileged, white, urban hipster culture.
Meanwhile, reality TV-star Honey Boo Boo and her family are rarely held up as models of
body-type diversity, instead functioning as icons of white trash culture who serve as the
butt of jokes. Fat-acceptance discourses are fine as long as they are solidly middle class
or highbrow but other kinds of obese bodies are trashy objects of humour and derision.
So while Roseanne in the 1990s also embodied this dynamic her working-class
crassness became tied to her weight and her sanity to make her seem out of control
Melissa McCarthys stardom hinges upon a separation of her over-the-top, trashy
characters and her authentic self, which must maintain certain class norms. Such a
separation allows for the articulation of fat-acceptance narratives about McCarthy and
feminist critiques of media and body image as long as they are acceptably classy while
also authorising the to-be-laughed-at-ness (Hole 2003) of the overweight, female body
as long as it is a trashy body.
At stake in these class dynamics are the boundaries of ideal, neoliberal citizenship. As
LeBesco (2003, p. 56) notes, fatness has long excluded individuals from full, cultural
citizenship within US capitalism. Fatness has long been linked to over-consumption and
signifies an excessive appetite that showcases the ills of consumer culture. Thinness, by
contrast, signifies disciplined consumption and thus a more moral vision of citizenship
(since overweight individuals are often blamed for social ills and for diverting food from
the needy). This is especially true in an era of neoliberal governmentality, where the ideal,
thin individual consumes food only to be followed by the consumption of exercise and
weight-loss products in an endless cycle of sustenance and discipline.
Today, however, the discourses of self-acceptance and self-confidence when linked to
the markers of social class provide an alternative route to obese cultural citizenship. The
rising power of feminist media critique has carved out a cultural space accepting of certain
kinds of overweight femininity. Such femininities first and foremost must demonstrate
particular kinds of class markers and good taste in order to disavow the troubling combination of low-class fatness, which continues to signify moral failure, social decline, and bad
consumer citizenship. However, these femininities must also ascribe to the mantras of selfacceptance and self-confidence, because these refrains facilitate participation in consumer

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citizenship. By creating another level of self-help products aimed at inner transformation,

these visions of overweight femininity can earn cultural belonging and citizenship.
McCarthy, then, helps demarcate these delicate boundaries. She can be a populist body
image heroine who demonstrates what a classy vision of overweight femininity looks like
for the consumers of womens magazines and celebrity culture in general. Yet she can also
use her excessive and raunchy performances to shore up her vision of self-confidence by
both mocking and appropriating the transgressions of trashy fatness.

Stardom and Saturday Night Live

The long running sketch comedy show SNL provides the perfect venue to examine
McCarthys star persona because the shows comedy often reflects the popular meanings
of its celebrity hosts. Each week, a new guest host leads the ensemble cast, and while not
all sketches feature the host, many of the sketches are written around what that particular
host can bring to the table. For example, sketches written for frequent SNL host Justin
Timberlake build on his pop star singing and dancing skills, while a recent episode hosted
by Sophia Vergara built several sketches around her associations with Latina stereotypes
her thick accent and voluptuous body. What is more, Petersen (2013) argues that SNL
provides an ideal venue for celebrities to articulate more depth and dimension to their star
texts, especially for rising stars. By demonstrating their ability to play along with the
meanings attached to their celebrity You dont make fun of who you are, just who
people think you are, says Petersen (2013) of successful hosting jobs on SNL rising
stars can play off their popular meanings while also demonstrating that they have more
dimension than the public gives them credit for.
SNL, then, provides a space within which the contours and contradictions of different
celebrity personas are displayed reflexively for public consumption. The show often uses
the popular meanings of their celebrity hosts as the basis for the sketches but then gently
mocks those meanings (and the celebrities) by exaggerating their personas (as was the
case with Sophia Vergaras accent) or by comically inverting the meanings attached to the
star (for example, when John Hamm known for playing the stoically masculine Don
Draper played an absentee father in a SNL sketch whose stoicism fails him as he lets out
an awkward, goat-like fit of weeping). This playful mocking of celebrity identity exposes
the constructed nature of stardom but ultimately affirms the cultural meanings of different
celebrities by letting us in on the joke. In this way, SNL provides an ideal site to
investigate the meanings of celebrity in contemporary culture. Celebrities resonate in a
particular historical moment often because their personas tap into inherent contradictions
or anxieties within the culture (Dyer 1984/2004, Marshall 1997, Turner 2004); SNL is one
space in which those contradictions are actively displayed and yet also contained behind
the image of the celebrity as a likeable individual.
The dominant cultural discourses concerning obesity, social class, and femininity,
then, are made visible through McCarthys body, costuming, make-up, and the scenarios
in which she is placed on the show. These images and narratives dramatise the dominant
cultural assumptions concerning corpulent femininity in contemporary US culture, revealing the contexts in which corpulence is stigmatised and when it can be appropriately
considered a site for self-confidence.

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Class and corpulence on Saturday Night Live

Almost every character that McCarthy plays on SNL is rooted in the performance of one
kind of excess or another, exemplifying the stereotypes of obese bodies in popular culture.
The transgression of thinness in media is often accentuated by excesses of violence,
sexuality, and gluttony.
For example, in her Season 38 appearance, McCarthy spoofed the controversy around
ousted Rutgers mens basketball coach Mike Rice fired for his violent outbursts and
homophobic slurs against his players by playing Shelia Kelly, a womens basketball
coach who lobs bricks and toasters at her players in a series of escalating attacks that
culminate in the tazing of students and professors on campus. McCarthy reprised her role
as Shelia Kelly in Season 39, this time envisioning Kelly as a freshman congresswoman
on a violent rampage (in a parody of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-NY, who threatened to
throw a reporter off a balcony).
Sexual excesses are even more prominent in McCarthys SNL roles. From a barfly in
Season 37 whose lovemaking receives many complaints (she can only have sex while
listening to the Rent soundtrack, she makes birdcalls, and her nickname is skidmark) to a
recently divorced woman in Season 39 who dove back into the dating pool and came up
with a mouthful of Hawaiian man-meat, much of the humour surrounding McCarthy
stems from her exuberant portrayals of hyper-sexual, take-charge women whose sexual
tastes tend towards the bizarre.
Additionally, while gluttony jokes would seem to be too insensitive in a culture
attuned to bullying and body image issues, McCarthys roles on SNL dive right into a
slough of eating humour. In Season 38, for example, she plays Barb Kellner, a woman
seeking a bank loan for a small business venture that consists entirely of her finishing off
uneaten pizza around the city. Later in that same episode, one of McCarthys characters
dances with two men in pig costumes in an attempt to win a local honey-baked ham
cook off.
These excesses reflect the ability of the transgressive body to make a mockery of
socially acceptable behaviour and celebrate the destruction of class norms. After all,
many of these skits pair McCarthy with a well-intentioned, middle-class white man
trying to cope with and make sense of her bizarre behaviour. Such foils only demonstrate that her characters undermine a stable sense of middle-class, patriarchal authority.
Her characters present a loud, sexual, violent, assertive challenge to the social norms
that uphold western cultural values. In this sense, her performances are similar to those
of Chris Farley, whose stint on SNL (from 1990 to 1995) generated a series of largerthan-life, excessive characters who undermined acceptable social boundaries. Olbrys
(2006) traces Farleys vacillation between a rebellious carnival-grotesque that
explodes social conventions and a hegemonic burlesque that structures his body as
a site of humour and derision. In Farleys classic Chippendale dancer skit opposite
Patrick Swayze, for example, Farleys sweaty, rotund, and exuberant dancing body is
judged next to Swayzes muscled, controlled, and idealised bare torso. Farleys performance hilariously undermines the male body norms that idealise muscle and selfdiscipline, but as the sketch progresses and Swayzes character wins their dance-off,
Farleys body is described as fat and flabby as he is disciplined into class norms
about weight and male beauty. Similarly, McCarthys performances offer vivacious,
extreme, and at times domineering women who shatter expectations of appropriate
feminine behaviour, only to veer into images and narratives that make her body a
source of discipline and shaming.

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While Farleys paradoxical persona became a cautionary tale about the dangers of
transgression with the comedians death in 1997, the rebellious transgressions of
McCarthys persona are often contained by displacing them into class stereotypes. Her
vivid depictions of sexual, violent, and gastronomical excess are matched on SNL by the
elaborate and excessive markers of low-class trashiness. The pizza-eating Barb Kellner,
for example, dons a pink tracksuit and huge outdated glasses under her curly bouffant.
Violent-tempered Shelia Kelly sports an oversized pantsuit and unflattering short haircut.
Season 39s Diane a foul-mouthed, red-nosed, rib-eating woman who becomes the
object of Bobby Moynihans affection drapes an unshapely cardigan over a frumpy
brown dress while wearing more giant glasses. As Jennifer Evans in Season 37 a
stereotypical online comments section troll who once called the cartoon cat Garfield the
N-word McCarthy sports long stringy hair while she wears that same brown cardigan.
As Kathleen in Season 39 a dim-witted game-show contestant who proffers nonsensical
answers like Pass the mash! her stringy wig makes her look balding as she wears a
frumpy, brown turtleneck sweater. Clearly, the writers and costume department at SNL see
McCarthys characters as exemplars of bad taste and crassness.
By using these markers of low social class, McCarthys characters on SNL become
objects of stigma, bodies unsuitable for cultural citizenship because they transgress
appropriate femininity and spaces of middle-class male authority. Examine, for instance,
the Season 37 sketch Arlene. In the sketch, a bland corporate setting finds Arlene
(McCarthy) making none-too-subtle sexual advances to her polite and uninterested coworker, Tim (Jason Sudekis). As the sketch progresses, Arlenes overt sexuality overwhelms the protestations of her coworker as her antics become increasingly graphic and
over the top. From rubbing his tie over her breasts and mock pole dancing on the string of
a helium balloon, to licking and fellating the nose of a horse-shaped balloon, Arlenes
unbridled sexual desire (her lady boner, as she calls it) cannot be contained by the rules
of proper office decorum or middle-class romantic values he protests that he is married
and has children, but Arlene only pretends to toss his wedding ring aside while continuing
to rub his chest.
These sexual excesses make a mockery of respectable, middle-class culture, using Tim
as a polite, white, male, middle-class foil to Arlenes uncontained sexual explosion. A
classic example of Bakhtins carnival-grotesque, Arlene turns the rules of the dominant
culture on their head: a bland place of corporate labour becomes a colourful site of
dancing, rubbing, and sexual innuendo; appropriate feminine norms of passivity are
tossed aside in favour of aggression; the nuclear family is dismissed as a hindrance to
passionate sex; mock bestiality serves as a symbol for human sex acts; an overweight
woman normally a symbol of ugliness or asexuality promotes herself as an object of
sexual desire; and female sexual desire is made visible and masculine (her lady boner)
instead of being denied as impure. Her wild, open sexuality demonstrates the ability of
corpulent femininity to overwhelm and elude the structures of male control (Braziel 2001,
p. 246).
But obesity and low social class cohere in the figure of Arlene to transform this ludic
rebellion against acceptable bourgeois values into a reactionary burlesque: Arlenes
inversions of the social order can be contained by making her ridiculous as a trashy, fat
lady. As with McCarthys other characters, Arlene exudes bad taste, from her wacky,
curled bouffant, brown sweater vest over a turtleneck and (again) outdated, oversized
glasses. Her appearance suggests another class inversion, setting her tacky appearance
against the mundane but professional world of middle-class corporate life. Rather than
enacting a transgressive critique of corporate labour, Arlenes appearance only marks her

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as an object of ridicule, establishing that the humour is rooted in the supposed discrepancy
between professionalism and bad taste, and also between trashy obesity and desirable
femininity.
Many of the sketches follow the lead of Arlene, rooting their humour in the spectacle
of obesity as trashiness. Exemplary among this trend is McCarthys most popular SNL
sketch about a Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing focus group in Season 37. In the
sketch McCarthy plays Linda, a Hidden Valley Ranch aficionado who has been invited to
participate in a focus group trying new flavours. When Linda learns that the participant
who gives the best comment will win $50, she aggressively pursues this goal. She begins
tossing out ridiculous catchphrases (Thats jack-tastic!), gets hostile with the blonde
woman next to her, and eventually squirts an entire bottle of the dressing in her face to
show her enthusiasm.
As if her love of Hidden Valley Ranch was not enough to convey bad taste (in an era
where highbrow foods come from farmers markets, Hidden Valley Ranch is the Walmart
of salad dressings), Linda sports a bad perm and an oversized sweatshirt with Mr Spock
(Leonard Nimoy) emblazoned on it, suggesting fan-geek stereotypes in lieu of trashy
working-class culture. Her out-of-control antics stem directly from her low-class status
her unusual admiration for Hidden Valley Ranch and her obesity the gluttonous
consumption of the dressing, even scraping the spilt dressing off her sweatshirt and
spooning it into her mouth. Instead of inverting or mocking the conventions and values
of bourgeois culture, Lindas behaviour instead simply invites the ridicule of those with
bad taste. By organising this mockery around a trashy food product, the sketch suggests
that obesity and low-class status are just two sides of the same coin: taken together, they
offer a convenient shorthand for signifying outcasts who cannot control their impulses or
conform to bourgeois cultural norms.
McCarthys monologues: authenticity and middle-class norms
In contrast to the excessive and confrontational characters McCarthy brought to life on
SNL, her monologues the stand-up comedy introduction each host offers near the
beginning of the show present McCarthy herself as a self-deprecating and lovable
woman whose humbling failures to conform to Hollywoods strict beauty norms reveal
how ridiculous those norms are to begin with. Instead of the excessively low-class get
ups that her characters wear, the monologues are some of the few times that we see
McCarthy in stylish clothes with her hair and make-up done according to current
standards of beauty and class, even when those very standards are the source of her
jokes.
Her Season 38 monologue demonstrates this tendency best. Dressed in black tights
and a black blouse with a stylish black cardigan over the top, her outfit is completed with
dazzlingly bright red, platform wedge, high heels. Her shoes style, however, trumps their
practicality; McCarthy attempts to finish her monologue while completely unstable,
desperately grabbing at the band members sharing the stage with her, flailing her arms
wildly, using a stool for balance, and ultimately just crawling on all fours to keep her
balance. Showing off a more subtle physicality to her slapstick skills than we see in her
excessive characters, McCarthy then attempts to complete the song-and-dance number
commemorating her second time hosting the show while barely able to contain her
frustration at the peppy cast member (Taran Killam) dancing around her. She then
explains to the crowd that she primarily wears Crocs but wanted to get gussied up for
the show.

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Displaying a seemingly authentic persona, McCarthy gently pokes fun at herself in

order to undercut the medias gendered beauty norms. McCarthy casts herself as a downto-earth, regular woman who, like the vast majority of women in the world, cannot live
up to the impossible expectations of womens beauty. The physically demanding feat of
wearing ridiculous high heels assumed to be a normal and natural way for women to
demonstrate their sexual desirability is made strange, unnatural, and hilarious when
real women reveal what hard work it is to act like a lady. Humbling herself before the
audience, McCarthy suggests that the performance of desirable femininity in the media is
a sham, an unnatural and unrealistic set of expectations.
If McCarthys star persona shows that the cultures ideals of attractiveness are a
carefully constructed performance, her SNL characters show that low-class values are
also a performance, offering over-the-top exaggerations that the humble and genuine
McCarthy can put on to garner laughs. Sandwiched between these two extremes,
McCarthys monologues normalise her performance of middle-class lovability as real
and authentic. She can make fun of the medias impossible beauty norms and offer
caricatures of low-class obesity because the public accepts the authenticity of her middleclass, relatable persona. She can embody the contradictions between the obesity epidemic
and the rise of fat-acceptance only by appealing to the discourses of middle-class
normalcy: obesity challenges the social order if it is crass and lower class, but at the
same time the extreme thinness and beauty standards of Hollywood are highbrow attempts
to denigrate authentic, middle-class women.
McCarthys other monologues support this same distinction between her authentic,
middle-class self and the crass trashiness of her characters. Her Season 37 monologue has
her promising to put on a cabaret-style dance with SNL regular and Bridesmaids co-star
Kristin Wiig. But after putting off the dance for minutes, the two disappear behind a
backlit curtain, revealing the silhouettes of more traditionally shaped exotic dancers in
their place. While the sketch literally replaces the body of the overweight woman with an
anonymous caricature of what the desirable female body is supposed to look like, the joke
only serves to highlight McCarthys welcome departure from media beauty norms.
Humbling herself again, the monologue makes her a relatable and self-deprecating figure
willing to joke about the impossibility for regular (middle-class) women to look like
exotic dancers.
Her Season 39 monologue adjusts this formula but still makes a joke about the
discrepancy between McCarthy and the average movie star. Purporting to show behindthe-scenes footage of McCarthys previous hosting stint, McCarthy makes fun of her
lovable and genuine persona by displaying herself as an out-of-control jerk. In the
flashback, she chews out cast member Bobby Moynihan, shatters flower vases, pushes
over an actor dressed as Abraham Lincoln, and then steals a live llama from the show that
happened to be in the hallway.
This monologue builds on the discrepancy between McCarthys general lovability and
her performance of another form of aggressive femininity that often provokes anxiety and
disdain from patriarchal culture for its transgressions of social power: the diva. While the
diva is a contradictory figure who challenges cultural categories of gender, sexuality, race,
and power, the label of diva is often used to denigrate assertive and powerful women as
too controlling, too demanding, and too narcissistic (Doty 2007). By setting McCarthys
seemingly authentic persona in opposition to the cultural figure of the diva, the sketch
provides assurances that McCarthy is not a threat to the social order. Instead, she simply
validates mocking out-of-control femininity, whether her crass and violent low-class
characters or the more highbrow spectre of the diva.

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R. Meeuf

McCarthys middle-class normality, then, is essential to containing the excesses of her

performances. Her celebrity illustrates that discourses of fat-acceptance and the imagery of
a successful overweight woman can be accommodated only when the threats that corpulent women be they trashy or divas can be cast as humorous performances (not
authentic challenges to the patriarchal order). McCarthys critiques of body image and
gender stereotypes can become mainstream only by being grounded in humble, middleclass femininity.

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Conclusion: citizenship and neoliberal self-confidence

The lovely and humble McCarthy seen on the SNL monologues has become synonymous
with self-confidence as the key to personal success. In popular magazines, she is most
often described as a celebrity who overcame Hollywoods weight obsession and should
serve as inspiration to regular women. Ladies Home Journal declared that Melissa
McCarthy is giving women everywhere the confidence to embrace who they are
(Newman 2012), while Good Housekeeping sees McCarthy as living proof that selfacceptance and perseverance can make any dream come true (Keeps 2012).
In this way, McCarthys celebrity dovetails with popular debates concerning women
and self-confidence, a debate that intensified in 2014 prior to the release of Tammy with
the publication of The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman (2014).
Building off the success of tech executive Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In (2013), which
explores why women still lag behind men in high-level leadership positions, The
Confidence Code is a self-help manual on the science and art of self-assurance for
women. The authors suggest that one of the key reasons behind continued workplace
gender inequality is confidence; womens own insecurities about their self-worth and
reluctance to promote themselves and their ideas are holding them back compared with
their more self-assured male counterparts. The book was widely reported on in US media
as the authors tapped into a powerful narrative of confidence as central to womens
empowerment.
As Kay and Shipman were making the rounds on morning television, controversy began to
surround these feel-good messages about respecting yourself. Feminist media critics condemned the individualistic messages of the confidence gap discussion, suggesting that such
narratives blamed women for their own oppression while ignoring the political, economic, and
cultural discrimination structured into US and other western cultures. As Jessica Valenti (2014)
wrote for The Guardians US edition, if women are not insecure then they are not paying
attention: Womens lack of confidence could actually just be a keen understanding of just how
little American society values them.
The backlash against the confidence gap pinpointed its roots in neoliberal capitalist
culture: by focusing on womens confidence, these approaches to inequality simply offer selfhelp mantras marketing consumer products rather than exploring the complex reasons why
inequality persists. By shifting responsibility away from the economic structures of US
capitalism that devalue women and womens labour, such discourses place the responsibility
for gender inequality on the shoulders of individual women, who must now transform
themselves from their behaviour to their appearance to be taken seriously within
patriarchal culture. Self-confidence itself, it seems, is fast becoming another commodity
that women are forced to pursue in neoliberal culture in the quest for cultural citizenship.
In the midst of these cultural debates, McCarthy became the poster child for selfconfidence rhetoric, but not by being traditionally beautiful and classy like the women
seen in the Dove True Beauty campaign. Instead, McCarthys ability to perform wild

Celebrity Studies

15

and wacky caricatures of bad taste on screen is cast as a challenge to Hollywoods

highbrow perfectionism for women. McCarthy herself frequently promotes this philosophy as central to her comedy. As she told Ladies Home Journal in 2012:

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One of my favourite things is playing someone whos utterly confident even if they are, just,
like wrong. Theyre off the beaten track. Theyre not polished or perfect, but theyre so solid in
their shoes. And I always think, Now thats someone whos interesting. They dont give a s what
theyre supposed to be, or who theyre supposed to look. I find them mesmerizing. I think theres
greatness in not caring what other people think. (Newman 2012)

For McCarthy, this greatness is also clearly tied to social class, to individuals who deviate
from bourgeois norms. Later in that interview, her example of these mesmerising individuals is the woman at Walmart whos happy in her cat sweater (Newman 2012), using
the popular meanings of Walmart stores as a locus of low social class to suggest this
carefree attitude. For McCarthy, self-confidence and bad taste cohere in figures like the
Walmart cat lady or Arlene on SNL, making them philosophical challenges to
Hollywoods glamorous but unhealthy promotion of perfect (highbrow) women.
However, the self-confidence that McCarthy models is not that of Arlene on SNL, who
casually tosses aside good taste and bourgeois sexual norms. Instead, McCarthy is celebrated for being a nice, polite, middle-class woman who excels at pretending she can be
Arlene (or any of the other zany, trashy characters she portrays). Figures like the Walmart
cat lady are appropriated as idols of self-confidence, but only when they can be used by
regular, middle-class women to affirm life lessons about self-assurance. In a neoliberal
culture in which obesity represents a monumental transgression signalling a loss of morals
and personal control the spectacle of corpulence can also signal the ultimate form of selfconfidence, as long as it is a farce put on by respectable, middle-class women.
This insistence that high social class and self-confidence are the keys to citizenship and
belonging in a neoliberal world create a narrative around McCarthy that, ostensibly, makes
her a figure of rebellion. Thanks to her self-assurance and middle-class respectability, she
can challenge Hollywoods cult of thinness and be a role model for real women, ensuring
that a broader range of bodies is represented on US screens. But this narrative places
responsibility on individuals to transform, if not their bodies then their outlook and
appearance as a solution to social inequalities, helping to obscure the stereotypes and
discrimination faced by people who violate social norms concerning normal or healthy
bodies. The real causes of inequality, from this perspective, are people who refuse to change
their physical appearance or their sense of self-confidence, not a system of stigma. As
McCarthys fame suggests, for those whose bodies mark them as outsiders or dangers to
social well-being, the path to cultural citizenship and acceptance leads through assurances of
high social class and a commitment to self-improvement, not social change.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1.
2.

See Wingard (2013) for a detailed discussion of citizenship within neoliberalism, with particular
attention paid to immigration and LGBTQ issues.
Guthman (2011) offers a detailed exploration of the obesity epidemic as a social construction
and the problematic science linking obesity to individual choices.

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Notes on contributor
Russell Meeuf is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the
University of Idaho. His research focuses on popular media, celebrity and stardom, and issues of
cultural diversity. He is the author of John Waynes World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties
(2013, University of Texas Press) and the co-editor of Transnational Stardom: International
Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture (2013, Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently writing a
book on the negotiation of cultural citizenship in popular entertainment media, examining US
film and television stars with non-normative bodies.

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