by ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Jennifer Livingston, a Wisconsin news anchor, scolded a viewer who criticized her weight. PHOTO/WKBT-TV/Associated Press
On her new show, “The Mindy Project,” Mindy Kaling plays a single doctor who is irked but not undone by a male colleague telling her she should lose 15 pounds.
Mindy Kaling in “The Mindy Project” does not fret about weight. PHOTO/Greg Gayne/Fox
Neither is Hannah, the character Lena Dunham plays on her HBO comedy, “Girls.” When a boyfriend asked her about her tummy flab, Hannah replied: “No, I have not tried a lot to lose weight. Because I decided I was going to have some other concerns in my life.”
On the MTV show “Awkward” it’s the high school bully, Sadie (Molly Tarlov), who is a little overweight, not her victims, and her avoirdupois doesn’t diminish Sadie’s power or confidence.
Self-acceptance has become a new form of defiance on television, especially among younger female comedians. Partly that’s because it’s refreshingly unusual. There’s little comic shock value left in profanity, obscenity or intolerance, but it’s still quite rare and surprising to see a woman not obsess about her waistline.
And gaining weight, it turns out, is the most outrageous stunt Lady Gaga has pulled to date. Instead of wearing raw animal flesh at a public event this summer, she wore her own — the one metamorphosis that even Madonna wouldn’t dare undertake. “I am not going to go on a psycho-spree because of scrutiny,” the singer stated after admitting she gained 25 pounds. “This is who I am. And I am proud at any size.”
Lady Gaga isn’t the first to fill out; if anything she is a follower in the sudden rise of the unapologetically not-thin. A few performers have flouted convention by flaunting a curvy figure, notably Kat Dennings, a star of “2 Broke Girls,” Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men” and Christina Aguilera on “The Voice.” But it’s most evident in female comedians like Ms. Dunham and Ms. Kaling, who have more power to break rules: by writing their own material and creating shows inspired by their lives, they can set their own standards of beauty and defy the dictate of stylists and casting directors in a way that other actresses cannot.
A lot of rules are being broken in romantic comedy. It used to be that plain, stocky fellows like Seth Rogen surprised everyone and got the gorgeous girl. Now Rebel Wilson, an Australian actress and comedy writer, is the plus-size bride who gets a dashing, adoring groom in “Bachelorette.”
And in that sense this license to eat marks a generational shift from comedians in their 40s like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who made their mark by being funny and also more feminine and pretty than comedy pioneers like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers. Ms. Fey has said she lost some 30 pounds to make the move from “Saturday Night Live” writer to performer. Ms. Dunham and her cohorts — a generation raised on Tyra Banks don’t-judge-me rants and after-school programs about anorexia — are rebelling against the ever more exacting standard of beauty in show business.
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