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The Daily Show Perfectly Predicted Modern Fat Pride 12 Years Ago

An overweight woman walks at the 61st Montgomery County Agricultural Fair on August 19, 2009 in Gaithersburg, Maryland. At USD 150 billion, the US medical system spends around twice as much treating preventable health conditions caused by obesity than it does on cancer, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said. Two-thirds of US adults and one in five children are overweight or obese, putting them at greater risk of chronic illness like heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes, according to reports released recently at the

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Blake Neff Reporter
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Buzzfeed pleased many, and grossed out even more, with a recent slideshow extolling the alleged hotness of overweight and obese women.

“This Is What The Average American Woman Looks Like In 2016: Damn hot, that’s what,” the headline blared before displaying 29 photos of women who ranged from “chubby” to “exerting tidal forces on nearby objects.”

It’s a standout example of the modern media’s fascination with normalizing obesity while denouncing the “fat-shamers” who dare suggest it’s a bad idea for the average American’s weight to start with a 3.

The denunciation of fat-shamers has come on hard in recent years, but one TV show saw it all coming more than a decade ago: The Daily Show.

You may be astonished, since today The Daily Show certainly isn’t known for being funny. Making an unfunny diversity hire to replace Jon Stewart will do that. But in 2004, The Daily Show stood atop the comedy universe. That year, the show’s writiers produced America: The Book, an immense comedic takedown of the American system of government, the media, and more.

Buried at the back of the book were a series of humorous predictions about where America would go in the future. Most of them (America will be 124% Hispanic, oil will run out in 2043) were laughable or outright impossible. But one such “laughable” prediction proved all too accurate:

The Daily Show's forecast for American obesity in 2015. [America: The Book screengrab]

The Daily Show’s forecast for American obesity in 2015. [America: The Book screengrab]

The prediction is uncanny, right down to the date. 2015, of course, is when irate fats got Reddit to ban the page FatPeopleHate, and it’s also the year that morbidly obese Tess Munster (NSFL) became the fattest model ever signed by a major fashion agency. Today, The Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, and other American thought leaders deride “fat-shaming” and extol “body positivity,” while the truly adventurous can cruise Craiglist for countless hookups with BBWs (Big Beautiful Women).

Of course, The Daily Show fancies itself a thought leader as well (even though nobody watches it now), so naturally it’s deeply upset about fat-shaming too:

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