[music]

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. In his new memoir, Emmy-nominated comedian, writer, and actor Ian Karmel writes, "In my life, I've weighed eight pounds and I've weighed 420 pounds, and right now, I'm almost exactly in between the two." He makes it clear that this book is not a weight loss book. Instead, Ian provides a candid and heartfelt collection of stories with the help of his sister, Alisa Karmel, who holds both a doctorate and Master's in psychology and Master's in nutrition.

Throughout the book, Ian defines words and other euphemisms for the word fat. Like overweight, big-boned, or chubby. He also shares reflections on swimming with and without a shirt, doctor's visits as a kid, high school popularity, and shopping for clothes. The book is titled T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People and it is out today. Ian Karmel joins us to discuss. Ian, welcome to All Of It, and happy publication day.

Ian Karmel: Thank you very much. I'm overjoyed to be here with you. That was also the most beautiful and concise description for the book. I've been struggling to do it even half that well for the last month. I'm going to steal every word you just said.

Kousha Navidar: You should. Then you should give credit to L. Malik Anderson who's one of our producers who helped put that together.

Ian Karmel: L. Malik Anderson rules. L. Malik, I'm going to be ripping you off in the next month and a half.

Kousha Navidar: Like any great writer, you got to rip off.

Ian Karmel: Great artists steal, right?

Kousha Navidar: That's right.

Ian Karmel: I don't know if I'm a great artist but I am a thief, so I'll be taking it.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Well, listeners, we're opening up our phones and we want to hear from you too. Are you someone who has struggled with your weight? When did you realize others thought of your size as a problem? How often do you feel people treat you differently because of your weight? What representations of fat people did you grow up seeing on television? Tell us your story. You can call us. You can text us. We're at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Ian, today is publication day, you have this memoir. First thing that I thought of when I looked at it was t-shirts, pools. That is a very interesting title. Can you tell us about that title a little bit?

Ian Karmel: Now, I think people wear t-shirts to the pool to protect themselves from the constant assassination attempts of the sun. That's become a more universal thing but for a very long time, a t-shirt in the pool was a feeling known almost exclusively by fat kids. It was a thing we did when we were little and we found that we were fat, and we wanted to somehow obscure or cover up that fact that we were fat and that we were supposed to be ashamed of our bodies by putting on a t-shirt and then getting it wet, which is absurd as much as it is sad I think because it would suck to your torso.

It would accentuate, if anything, your curves. I spent my entire childhood in pools as a kid with still my fat body but just through a wet Big Dog t-shirt. I thought that anyone who had also been a fat kid would immediately know the sensation of wearing a t-shirt in the pool.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting to see your career as both a stand-up comedian and a writer for Late Night now doing a memoir, which is a different form of writing. First, what inspired you to write the book? Then second, what was the process like for you to try this new medium?

Ian Karmel: The inspiration for the book. I was talking to my little sister who has a doctorate in psychology and works in nutrition and who was also a fat kid. I had gotten myself to a weight where I was healthier. She had done the same thing. We were looking back on that process and we realized we'd never spoken to each other about our experiences being fat kids. I think when you're a kid, it's hard to talk about. It's hard to put those feelings into words. Then as you get older, it's like you're in a hurricane and it's hard to talk about, you're like, "Boy, the wind is really strong."

No, you're nailing boards to windows. Running into the basement to get away from it. We finally got a little bit of distance from it. We were looking back and she dealt with being a fat kid by getting a doctorate in psychology. I dealt with it by doing the opposite. Getting into comedy. We thought I think we have two really good perspectives here. I think there's a lot of things we're talking about right now that we haven't seen written down before and especially, there's been some amazing books by women about the experience of being fat. Roxane Gay, Lindy West, so many people.

From the male perspective, there hadn't been as many and I think it's because men are not-- I think we're told not to indulge those feelings and we're told to toughen up. I know that I dealt with being fat either joking about it or being sad alone and not telling anyone else because it was bad enough feeling different because of my body. I didn't then want to start complaining about it around other people and give them another reason in my head not to like me. That's isolating. It makes you feel alone, it makes me feel lonely, even more depressed, and when you already deal with those feelings by eating, which is what I did, and eventually drinking and doing drugs, and all sorts of other things where I could continue to seek comfort, I think those feelings can be really dangerous.

We thought in a way that is funny and empathetic, hopefully coming from me and in a way that is very knowledgeable and empathetic coming from my sister, who literally deals with patients about this kind of thing, we thought it would be a really good way to talk about this stuff and tell that story and hopefully help some people, at the very least make them laugh.

Kousha Navidar: That gender piece that you're talking about is so interesting. Can you go into that a little bit? What was it like for you thinking about here is what is missing in this gap among people, maybe specifically people who identify as male as being overweight? What's the role that I can fill in there?

Ian Karmel: Yes, I definitely did. I think the world is even more cruel to fat women, by the way. I also think there's maybe a bit more of a support system, or at least permission to talk about it amongst themselves in a way that there hadn't been for men. The first time I felt any sort of approval from my big fat body, I played football all through grade school, middle school, high school and that was the first time I ever got any information that was positive about my body. That was the first role I played. I played defensive tackle on the football team. It was good that my body was big, as long as I used it to hurt other kids. I'm not trying to paint some sob story. I loved it. I loved the sound of the drums. I loved wearing the jacket. I loved getting to be part of this team. The togetherness, the camaraderie. It was fantastic.

Kousha Navidar: You yourself had described yourself in the book as being popular too in high school.

Ian Karmel: I was a popular kid. Yes. Absolutely. I got to go to parties. I had lots of friends. That popularity definitely had a ceiling that I saw other popular kids not hit. Part of that was self-imposed by myself the way I saw fat people's romantic lives portrayed in popular media, which was non-existent or as a laughingstock. If a fat guy tried to kiss the girl, people laugh. That's what I saw. That was the ceiling that was posed on my popularity in high school, and I loved it but at the same time, there was this awareness that I was only popular as long as I decided to use my body to hurt other kids.

Once I got out of high school, once that football thing got taken away, I quickly found comedy and I made fun of myself. That's the first thing you do as a stand-up comedian. You walk up on stage and you're like, "I know what you're thinking." Da, da, da. My first joke, I would go up on stage and say, "My name is Ian Karmel, which is ridiculous because I'm a six foot three 350 pound Jew and my name sounds like a whimsical British candy store." My name should be, I don't know if I can fit, my name should be be Shlomo Puttingboobs basically.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Boobs is okay.

Ian Karmel: Boobs is okay.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: [unintelligible 00:08:14] yet.

Ian Karmel: That wasn't the word. I replaced the more I think acceptable, and my catchphrase should be better put some butter on it. In my head, I'm like, "Okay, I'm skewering the image of the fat comedian a little bit." Really, I was making fun of myself and I found a new role that I could play as long as I mind my own pain for it. Again, I'm making this sound like it was a miserable experience. I love high school, which I think is pretty rare, especially for someone on Public Radio.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: I also loved high school. Between the two of us, maybe we can be the outliers on the right-hand side.

Ian Karmel: I think we represent 100%, I don't know how Ira Glass' experience was but I bet it wasn't great.

Kousha Navidar: Well, Ira Glass if you want to call in, 212-432-WNYC. Go ahead, hit us up.

Ian Karmel: Let us know if you had fun in high school. We'll be listening. Then I really enjoyed my experience in stand-up comedy but the entire time, it was me taking these feelings and this pain and these fears, definitely a lot of fear and anxiety about being fat and my experiences and stuffing them away and never wanting to subject anyone else to them. I think imposed by society a little bit but there's this insidious thing about bullying, which is, I think it's like the opposite of termites. They say once you see one termite, it's too late, they're in the foundation. Once you get bullied once you assume the same thing, even if it's not. You assume there's whisker filter.

Kousha Navidar: It's still felt through which you see everything in the world today.

Ian Karmel: Everyone's talking about how fat I was.

Kousha Navidar: Do you see most of your bullying came from yourself or did it come from others?

Ian Karmel: Definitely from myself. Looking back on it. There was a fair amount coming from other people and even just the passive bullying of just being fat in a world that is-- it's hard not to take the dark thing from my book, but being fat in a world that is built to thin people. I went to Six Flags with my family when I was probably 12, 13 years old and waited in line for a roller coaster for two hours in the hot sun. I got up to the front of it, and they pulled the bar down, and the bar didn't fit over my belly, and that sucked. Because you just waited like two hours, and it's humiliating, and then you get up. That's the passive bullying of the world, and then somebody in line yelled out, "Get in my belly," from--

Kousha Navidar: Austin Powers.

Ian Karmel: Austin Powers. That's more of the active bullying, so you're getting all those at the same time. You go into clothing stores, and the person working there's like, "I could check the back." Where it's like, "Well, if you have the size, put it out with everybody else." I shouldn't have to go through this perilous journey just to see if you have enough fabric to cover my disgusting torso. Put it out with everybody else. Even now that I've lost quite a bit of weight, but I still wear XL or 2XL sometimes. Even still, I get that, " We can look in the back," and

[crosstalk]

Kousha Navidar: It's feeling like you are relegated to the back.

Ian Karmel: Absolutely. Especially right now where Americans are fat. A lot of us are fat. I say fat by the way. I don't think there's anything wrong with the word fat. I think if we want to change the way the word fat feels, we should change the way we treat fat people, and that'd be a great way to fix it.

Kousha Navidar: Well, listeners, let's bring you into the conversation. Is a lot of what Ian's saying resonating with you? What would you like to contribute? Especially if you identify as fat, when did you realize that others thought of your size as either an issue, or maybe a problem? How often do you feel people treat you differently? Tell you that they can look in the back. Give us a call, send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-9692. Ian, we got a couple of calls. I want to take them before we go to break.

Ian Karmel: Sure.

Kousha Navidar: Here is Cheryl in Lindenhurst, Long Island. Hey, Cheryl. Welcome to the show.

Cheryl: Yes. Thank you for putting me on. I want to thank you so much for writing this book, because so much of it is resonating with me, and it's actually bringing tears to my eyes. I grew up in a family where my weight was always an issue. I was always fat. I was chubby, and I just grew up thinking, "Well, that's my lot in life." I've realized now that I was really beaten down about it. Then I went into a relationship with a boyfriend, who would tell me, "Well, if you lose 50 pounds, I'll marry you," and I found that acceptable because of the way I grew up.

My weight went up and down. It fluctuated, and then about five years ago, six years ago, my weight reached almost 300 pounds. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd pray to God, "Please, don't let me wake up." That's when I knew I had to do something. I took myself off to WeightWatchers. I lost 108 pounds. I felt great about myself. The pandemic hit, I put on probably about 30, and I started all those old feelings of being fat, of being called a fat pig and being bullied about my weight, it started to come back. I've worked really hard to say these feelings are not acceptable, and so I'm back on my WeightWatcher journey again, and slowly taking off those 30 pounds.

Kousha Navidar: Cheryl, I want to thank you so much for calling and for sharing that. We're thinking of you and we so appreciate you sharing that difficult, but it sounds like empowering journey that you're going on right now, and we are sending you the best, and thank you so much again. Folks, we're here with Ian Karmel, who is the author and comedian, the book, his memoir, T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People. We are taking your calls. We got to take a quick break, but I see the call box lighting up right now. When we come back, we'll talk more about Ian, and we'll take some more of your calls. Stay with us.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, and we are talking with Ian Karmel, the author and comedian. The new book that he has out, publication day is today, it's called T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People. Folks, we're taking your calls. If you'd like to participate in this conversation, especially if you are someone who has struggled with their weight, give us a call. We want to know, when did you realize others thought of your size as a problem? What representations of fat people did you grow up seeing on television? Give us a call, send us a text.

We're at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Let's dive into some more calls. We've got Catherine in North Bergen, New Jersey. Hey, Catherine. Welcome to the show.

Catherine: Thank you so much. What a fun topic. Yes, I've been a big person my whole life. I knew it when I was three years old. Usually athletic family, seven brothers and sisters, and all I ever really wanted to be was an actor. Just very quickly, as I went to 1st grade, my mother looked at me in the box-pleated catholic school skirt, and she said, "Oh, boy, that makes you look twice the size. Too bad, and you have to wear it for eight years." That was 1st grade. Now let's fast forward, because I know you want to talk about high school.

I was about go to high school, and the first thing, she looks at me, she says, "Catherine, you're never going to have beautiful clothes. You're never going to have a man, and no one's ever going to give you a good part."

That was how we started high school. Now let's fast forward to videotape. I became an opera singer. I sang in 28 countries. When I first went to New York as an actor at 17 with $60, I became a Couture seamstress. I had all the beautiful clothes I could ever want. I married an Arabian Prince. Often in my life, I've looked back at those things, and I thought, "Wrong again, Ma."

Kousha Navidar: Catherine, I'm going to pause you there. Thank you so much for going through that. Ian, I'm sure you can relate to a lot of that questioning about the direction you wanted to go, and what was possible. There's a text here that says, "As a fat person, I always say every fat person wakes up and says, "Today is the day I won't overeat." I'm just wondering, listening to Catherine, Catherine talks like that. Does that resonate with you with your own journey?

Ian Karmel: All of it. Everyone we've spoken to so far has resonated with me in big meaningful ways, from the humiliation from the calls coming from inside the house, as it were as a kid, to that defiance. To feeling that like existing in defiance of everything that you were told you couldn't be. I think that's wonderful. I think adults don't really know how to talk to their kids about being fat, unless it's-- because you see how much pain the world inflicts on fat people, as a parent, I'm sure. I don't have to kid myself, but my sister who I wrote the book with does.

I've talked to my parents about it, and you want to do anything to get in the way of that pain. Sometimes the only thing you can think of is saying like, "Unless you get smaller, the world is going to hurt you." The only way I know of trying to motivate you to get smaller is to tell you that, or to shame you, or to or to scare you. Unfortunately, that causes stress. If we're fat in the first place, we usually don't respond to stress with it's fight or flight. Oftentimes we go flight, and we fly into our comforts, which is food, which is eating, which is hiding from things.

People are so condescending to fat people. Every morning we do wake up, and say today is the day I'm not going to overeat. Nobody knows how to lose weight better than a fat person. It'll come from doctors, it'll come from people in your life, it'll come from Bill Maher, who is saying, "Hey, Fatty. Just put down the cookie and pick up a kale chip." We know that. We understand that better than anyone. We know that intimately, every fat person has been on a million diets, and we've all had them fail, because most diets aren't compatible with living a real life.

It's all these efforts to shame us and scare us when I think the best thing you can do, especially if you're a parent, is have a conversation with your kid, if you have a fat kid, that is either positive or neutral about their body. You don't have to be positive about fat when in its relation to your health or anything like that. You can have honest conversations about that, but I think oftentimes people are afraid to talk about it at home, because they want the house to be a safe haven. That's what my house was like growing up. I felt fat everywhere but at home, but that meant I wasn't having any conversations about my body that were either positive or neutral. I was only having the negative ones outside of my house.

Kousha Navidar: Well, we have a caller who is a parent, that would like to chime in. Here's Bill from Brooklyn. Hey, Bill. Welcome to the show.

Bill: Thank you. Yes, I have a child in elementary school, and he's always been on the upper end of the percentiles for his weight and body mass. Watching the way the world is starting to react to him, is just heartbreaking. I keep thinking that this is just such a relentless form of prejudice. If you substituted any other kind of identifying term or identity for fat, you'd never be able to say those things out loud.

Kousha Navidar: Bill, what are some ways that you're trying to support your child? Hey, Bill. Are you with us?

Bill: Yes. By telling him that he is perfect just as he is, and making sure that he eats healthily, and stays active.

Kousha Navidar: Bill, thank you so much for calling and for sharing that. Ian, as you're listening, that resonates a lot with some of the things that you were saying before, right?

Ian Karmel: Yes, absolutely. I think that positive feedback is good. I think having frank conversations with your kid about how they're feeling and any bullying they might experience is a positive thing you can do. I think just encouraging your kid to have an active relationship with their health, I think is a very important thing to do because just speaking personally, I didn't. You can be fat and you can be healthy. There are a lot of people who we would consider fat or who would be considered obese on the BMI scale who have very active relationships with their health.

I think it's important to let fat kids know that and to remind them that. Go to the doctor with them. Make sure that that doctor isn't leading with, "You're fat and that's a problem." Go to the doctor and make sure that they're leading with, "Let's talk about your health. Let's look at other metrics that aren't the number on the scale, that aren't BMI. Let's talk about is your blood sugar high?" You can address that in a way that isn't necessarily fat-shaming. Your blood pressure, those things.

Kousha Navidar: Your point about it being the filter through which you see the world and it being a world that's dictated by thin people I think is also quite interesting. My producer just sent me a tweet that Emma Fitzsimmons from The New York Times, who's The New York Times Bureau Chief in city hall just put out that said, "Mayor Eric Adams just told a reporter at his weekly news conference that it looks like he's been working out and working on his summer body." That's just everything that we see is through-- yes, go ahead.

Ian Karmel: You don't want to be a bummer. You don't want to be the person who says like, "Hey, if you've been working on your arms, if you've been hitting curls at the gym and you want to come in your biceps popping out of a tight t-shirt--" Maybe the mayor shouldn't be commenting on anyone's body. That's probably the right answer. You don't want to not be able to do that at a barbecue or anything like that. I personally don't think we should chuck the baby out with the bath water.

I'm not one of those people. I just happen to believe that we don't need everything to be quite so buttoned down, but I think let's-- that's okay. A fat person works out too.

Kousha Navidar: For more than eight years, you were a writer on The Late Late Show with James Corden, and some of the jokes that you wrote were self-deprecating jokes about fat people, which you knew would work. Do you feel like fat jokes are looked at as critically as other kinds of jokes in terms of crossing a line? What was your experience looking back on those jokes?

Ian Karmel: No, certainly not, and certainly not when it's a fat person delivering them which is what we were doing. James is fat. I'm fat. I was fatter then. I would write these jokes that I knew would work for him because I knew they worked for me when I did standup. They operated on the same principle. No, that line is barely there for other comedians.

Kousha Navidar: We just got a text that says, "What if any discussions did Ian have with James Corden about struggling with weight?" How did that all play in with the way you decided to tackle it?

Ian Karmel: At first, it didn't. The first three, four years of the show, you are figuring out as you go. You're building the boat after you've launched it out to the sea. We were doing anything, telling fat jokes, making his weight the butt of jokes and sketches. I remember an early sketch where we had him and David Beckham both shirtless during this perfume commercial and it was the same thing that the Patrick Swayze, Chris Farley Chippendale sketch worked on where it's one classically handsome dude, and then one guy who, of course, it's ridiculous that anyone would find him alluring in any way because he is fat and shirtless.

We would do that. It hit an inflection point for us when Bill Maher who we shared a studio with, a studio building, we were in a TV City in West Hollywood, did this rant at the end of one of his shows talking about how we should bring back fat shaming as though it had ever gone anywhere in the first place and that we needed to fat shame fat people for their own good and we needed to do it because they were harming themselves and they were harming the economy and the healthcare industry by taxing it too much.

We were sitting in a meeting and that clip had gone viral and we were just like, "You're the perfect person to say something about this. You have a show. You have a platform. You're a fat person. You've been fat your whole life. You know better than anyone that fat shaming hasn't gone anywhere," because he experiences it and works in defiance of it throughout his entire career. Sometimes in defiance, sometimes in compliance with it, to be frank. We sat down and the two of us wrote something together.

I think the thing that we did on The Late Late Show that I'm the most proud of, that and the Paul McCartney Carpool, I think are one or two, where he said, "You know what? You don't need to fat-shame us. We live in constant shame. That doesn't work. We need to be supported. We need to be helped. We need to be shown humanity." After that, we stopped making fat jokes in the monologue. We were like, "We can't be saying this out of one side of our mouth and then out of the other participating in the system that has devalued us for our entire lives."

Kousha Navidar: If you could go back, would you have done anything differently back when you were making those fat jokes or--

Ian Karmel: I think for the first few years, yes, I would've loved if we could have gotten there sooner because he's a funny guy. We didn't need to do that. We didn't need to throw ourselves overboard for the sake of a laugh. Every now and then, it's fine. You can do that. Again, I don't want to live in a world where there's no fat jokes. I want to live in a world where life is better for fat people in general and then we can keep some of the jokes. That's fine. Just let me buy a shirt. Let me go to the doctor and actually discuss my broken ankle instead of him bringing up my blood pressure first.

Kousha Navidar: It sounds like you're almost relying on it, which is interesting because it reflects something you said before the break, which was you just keep going back to what you felt safe in, where the comedy felt safe. That seems like an interesting reflection there.

Ian Karmel: Absolutely. Fat jokes do feel safe because you've been making them since the first moment you found out you were fat at recess. When some kid tells you you're fat so you find out that fat is a thing, that you are it, and that it is bad, all at the same time. A real triple crown baby.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: I think we got time for just one more quick caller. Let's take Charlotte in Karmel, New York. No relation with our guest. Charlotte, hey. Welcome to the show.

Charlotte: I'm delighted. Thank you for writing this book and I'm going to go out and buy it. I stopped listening to Bill Maher after that rant. That was the end of it for me. One of my pet peeves-- I've been everything from a medium to a 3XL where they put the clothes for women at the larger end. They either stick us at the front so everybody knows where the fat girls are, or they put us in the farthest corner with no room between the racks. Why we can't shop with everybody else?

Why we can't get clothes that look like everybody else's, not just great big squares with four holes in them? I don't know, but I'll take the comments off air. I love this segment. Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: Charlotte, thank you so much for calling in for that shout out. We really appreciate you sharing. Got about 30 seconds left. In that time, people that take this book, that they read it, what do you hope that they take from it?

Ian Karmel: I hope they take a conversation about fat that is not necessarily negative. One that is full of joy and empathy. Also, for my little sister, someone who has a doctorate in psychology and works in nutrition, also information. In each one of these chapters, I plumb my soul and try to bear everything that I was going through. Then, she comes through and takes that information and tries to be like, "Here's what you can talk to your kids about." "Here's what adults are going through when that happens." It's the hope that people know that they're not alone.

I know maybe that sounds trite, but it really is, you are not alone. There are other people going through this and you don't have to go through it without help.

Kousha Navidar: It's a great sentiment and it's a great book. We thank you so much for coming. Emmy-nominated comedian, writer, and actor Ian Karmel's new book is titled T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People. Today is publication day. Congrats, Ian, and thanks for hanging out with us.

Ian Karmel: Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. I really enjoyed it.

Kousha Navidar: It was a blast. Oh, me too.

[00:28:47] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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