At the Canadian Comedy Awards last month, all you had to do to get a snicker from the audience was mention the name Nicole Arbour. Arbour is a Canadian comic whose “fat-shaming” video on YouTube garnered millions of views, the disgust of the comedy community and lots of hate mail.
Her channel was briefly disabled by YouTube, she was discussed on CNN, made Time magazine and had no less than Whoopi Goldberg take her down on The View.
It’s the kind of publicity that comedians would kill for because, in our brave new world of social media, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Everything creates a market. If Arbour had planned the whole thing, you could call her some kind of marketing genius.
But why such an unprecedented reaction to a bunch of fat jokes? It isn’t like they hadn’t been done before. Check out the great Bill Burr’s routine about fat people sitting next to him on an airplane. The differences tells us a lot about how comedy really works.
Nicole Arbour is attractive, as she will tell anyone who’ll listen, proclaiming herself the “world’s sexiest comedian” some years ago. If Arbour had average looks, it wouldn’t seem so tasteless to attack the rotund. But the gap between her body and the heavy-set makes her look like a mean bully.
If you watch the video — it was not recorded in front of a live, laughing audience — you’ll see the commentary is smash edited and delivered straight to camera. There’s no clue that it’s meant to be funny.
The material isn’t good, but what’s worse is that she editorializes, acting as if she cares about overweight people.
Nicole Arbour almost never performs live. She has no act worth watching. But it isn’t because she has no talent. I first met her when she took the comedy course at Humber, and I thought she showed some promise. But she shirked off the painstaking effort of sweating out an act one line at a time. She never seemed interested in doing sets in clubs. She took the lazy way out of making videos that capitalized on her good looks, and galling as it must be to most comedians, it’s working.
But she does have her defenders, mostly on the issues of free speech and political correctness. They may not care for what she says, but defend her right to say it. Fat jokes, they would say, are not at the same level of public transgression as jokes about race. If we can’t make fun of anybody a bit different, who will be left? Jokes about Belgians? Cat owners?
Arbour would be so much easier to defend if she were just funnier. Sarah Silverman’s done some tasteless racial humour, so has Amy Schumer. But it was always clear that those jokes were just jokes because here we’re dealing with two exceptionally talented artists.
One thing I will say is that Arbour has a disruptive quality that mirrors some of the new technologies, and the swirling controversies that surround her work can be a tonic for the safe, polite, corporate approach to comedy that has become the norm.
It’s no accident that so many blog posts about her have referenced Donald Trump’s bizarre presidential bid.
It’s hard to say what will happen to Nicole Arbour next.
Will she enjoy her 15 minutes of fame and be forgotten? Or will she be able to leverage the attention into something bigger or longer lasting? At this point, nobody knows.
Of course, she could always run for president.
