Fabricated Flesh: Fat Suits & Failures of Subversion in Gross-Out Comedy Films

Abstract

Fabricated Flesh: Fat Suits & Failures of Subversion in Gross-Out Comedy Films explores how Hollywood used fat suits in the peak years of gross-out comedy, from 1996 to 2007. This period brought together new prosthetic technologies, the rise of diet culture, and a moral panic around the “obesity epidemic.” The result was a cycle of films that amplified anti-fat stereotypes through their prolific use of prosthetic fatness. The dissertation focuses on five case studies. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (Jay Roach, 1999) and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (Rawson Marhsall Thurber, 2004) show how fatness was tied to class excess and comic grotesquerie. Shallow Hal (Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 2001) and The Nutty Professor (Tom Shadyac, 1996) highlight how fat suits were used in an attempt to moralize about fatness while still leaning on anti-fat humor and reifying rigid gender scripts. Norbit (Brian Robbins, 2007) demonstrates the culmination of these trends, where racial caricature and anti-fat tropes merged in ways that pushed the gross-out genre toward collapse. Through close readings of these films and their production histories, the project shows how fat suits disciplined spectatorship by teaching audiences to conflate fatness with failure, pity, or contamination. While marketed as transgressive or empathetic, these performances rarely disrupted stigma. Instead, they reinforced cultural scripts that treated fatness as disposable. By situating these comedies within the broader history of fat suit performance and the cultural politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the dissertation argues that the fat suit was never a neutral prop. It was central to how Hollywood taught viewers to see fatness, and it remains a key lens for understanding the intersection of comedy, technology, and body politics.