I feel sorry for middle-class white guys. They get no respect. They must be feeling pretty cheated right about now, too. If I didn’t know so many personally, I would think they were all fat, stupid, lazy and helpless.
Why? Because that very image is what I am inundated with on a daily basis in all forms of media. Morning radio shows showcase Idiot Every-Dudes obsessed with sex and bodily functions. Print ads offer a slight variation on this theme: young men with unachievable-for-most physiques, but still addicted to sex and dumb as rocks. But television, the most pervasive of all media, is the greatest culprit in the “guy as stupid/fat/
lazy/helpless” campaign.
The joke is as old as the situation comedy, starting with fat Jackie Gleason and thin Audrey Meadows in “The Honeymooners” back in 1955. But while Gleason’s threatening, ready-to-punch “to the moon, Alice!” gesturing has long been outmoded by women who give as good as they get, the physical stereotypes have far from disappeared, actually being promoted to new heights in recent years.
The standard sitcom formula seems to be the aforementioned portly male, coupled with a thin, smart, sexy, young woman. The examples of this on network television are many. FOX has “Family Guy,” “King of the Hill,” “Quintuplets” and “The Simpsons.” ABC: “George Lopez” and “According to Jim” (albeit the former is about a stupid Mexican-American male, but the formula remains the same). But the all-time greatest contributor to this myth of the stupid white male by far is CBS, with its arsenal of “The King of Queens,” “Still Standing,” “Listen Up” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
For the formula at its best, observe the genuinely funny Kevin James as Doug in “Queens.” To his fit, witty, sassy wife, Carrie (played by fit, witty, sassy Leah Remini), he often quips, “I’m fat, but you’re mean.” Their believable chemistry and the juxtaposition of her non-physical flaws make the relationship somewhat plausible. However, the show’s theme (Doug gets himself into trouble, Carrie fixes it; Doug irritates Carrie with his stupidity, Carrie gets over it because Doug is so gosh darn lovable) feeds into the disturbingly prominent ideology that a woman can be a bitch as long as she’s thin and a man can be fat as long as he’s an idiot and, therefore, no real threat to anyone.
But “Queens” is where the comedy goodness ends for CBS. For the formula at its worst, see any of the above-listed shows. For our purposes, “Listen Up” offends greatest with its pairing of everyone’s favorite stocky guy, Jason Alexander, with wispy, mostly unknown (unless you remember “Sister Act 2” very well) Wendy Makkena, as Tony and Dana Kleinman. What made Alexander so
believable in his “Seinfeld” days was his character’s uncanny ability to
repel women.
One episode of Alexander’s new series (“Tony Whine-Man,” episode 1.17) was deemed “so bad it baffles science” by one Internet Movie Database user. In this episode, Dana dresses in a slutty, age-inappropriate outfit to show Tony’s old summer camp buddies that the once slouchy, be-spectacled Jew married a “fox.” She proceeds to prance around in hooker heels, coming on to his “friends” and embarrassing all who watch the show and hopefully all who had hand in creating it.
People watch television for several reasons: to escape, to be entertained, but mostly to identify
with other humans. They want to
see themselves on the screen
and know that others, even pre-constructed, exaggerated, false others, are going through the same trials and tribulations that make up our American life.
Just whose American life are we watching?

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