THE FUN OF GETTING THIN


CHAPTER I

FAT

A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes--one on herself and
the other on her husband. Half the comedy in the world is predicated
on the paunch. At that, the human race is divided into but two
classes--fat people who are trying to get thin and thin people who are
trying to get fat.

Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out the
last two letters of the indictment. Fat is fat. It isn't any more
fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it's a
darned sight more uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin or
unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the long
end of it. I never was thin, so I don't know. However, I have been
fat--notice that "have been"? And if there is any phase of human
enjoyment, any part of life, any occupation, avocation, divertisement,
pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it in any regard,
I failed to discover it in the twenty years during which I looked like
the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a bale
of hay.