In one episode of Living Single, “Crappy Birthday,” the friends take Queen Latifah’s character, Khadijah, on a trip to Atlantic City to celebrate her special day. A blindfolded Khadijah is in the back with their suitcases when a character notes that something is weighing down the car. Queen Latifah, still blindfolded, quipped, “You better not be looking at me.”
“It is a fat joke,” said Erika Alexander on a recent episode of the ReLiving Single podcast, but it was one of the few punchlines about the cast members’ weight that made it on the show. “I’m surprised we let that one go.”
That was because Queen Latifah had made it clear that weight jokes were off limits, telling producers, “We’re not going to be doing that.”
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“And then,” said Alexander, “they disappeared.”
That kind of humor is a cheap comedy trope, according to Alexander. “You could just keep making fun of people’s weight.” It’s a device that’s been used in sitcoms from The Honeymooners to What’s Happenin’ to Roseanne, but few fat jokes made it into the final Living Single scripts.
That didn’t stop producers from making weight an issue behind the scenes, said Alexander’s costar Kim Coles. “I would get a call at the beginning of every season to my manager saying, ‘Kim Coles has to lose some weight. She has to lose some weight. She has to lose some weight.’”
But Coles gained weight every year over the course of the show’s run. “I had a really hard time,” she said, “feeling as if everybody was staring.”
Even though Queen Latifah insisted on no weight jokes, executives still used potential punchlines as blackmail. “You won’t remember this,” Coles reminded Alexander, “but I told you that they threatened me and said, ‘If you keep gaining weight, we’re going to have to start writing fat jokes.’ And you said, ‘I won’t read those jokes.’”
Alexander insisted that all of the Living Single cast would have supported Cole by refusing those insults. “You have to have willing collaborators,” she said. “But, you know, the sad part is it got in your mind because I do remember that you went on a very concerted effort throughout the series to keep the image that they wanted.”
Coles agreed that “these suits in an office somewhere” had a very specific, narrow view of the definition of sexy. But that image didn’t conform to what she was hearing elsewhere. She’d complain about those expectations to male friends, who told her, “There’s no man in America that would kick any one of y’all out of bed.”
Okay, that was a crude way to express support, admitted Coles. “But I think what was beautiful about us is, there were four completely different body types,” she said. “And we looked like women that everybody knew in our community.”