To what extent is Weird Al's "Fat" body-shaming? Personally, I like the video.

Over the past couple days, as Weird Al was releasing his new stuff, Lis and I were going back and watching his videos back-to-back with the things they were parodying. He stopped doing as many direct parodies after MTV stopped playing videos: during MTV's heyday, everybody would be familiar with every source video shot-for-shot, so people would appreciate a shot-for-shot parody; since then, he'll riff off of images in the original -- the flaming Pac-Man in "White and Nerdy", the "Weird Al Has a Big Dictionary" balloons in "Word Crimes" -- but there's not as much point in trying to re-create the original as there used to be.

So we've been watching his earlier stuff. I'd actually never seen the video for "Living With a Hernia", especially not back-to-back with "Living in America"; I highly recommend it. I hadn't realized just how much Al looks like James Brown. (Hint: not very much. But he makes it work anyway.)

As far as we can tell, his closest parodies are "Living With a Hernia", "Smells Like Nirvana", "Eat It", and "Fat".

And so, that brings me to my question. Is "Fat" an example of body-shaming?

Because, to me, it doesn't really feel like it. Nowhere near as much as I expected it to. Yes, there are bits where they have all the dancers getting out of breath. Yes, there's the bit where they get stuck trying to jump over the turnstiles. But, I dunno. They don't feel mean to me. It doesn't feel like the same kind of "laughing at the fat person" that really bothers me. Emotionally, the message of "The whole world knows I'm fat and I'm proud/And I tell you once again -- Who's Fat?" actually feels like the real message.

But I'm not as fat as some of my other friends, and I'm male. We males don't tend to get as much body-shame thrown at us. So I'm curious as to what other people's experience of the song is.