Big fat [X]
Weddings, sausages, idiots, hens.
The third installment of the Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise opened September 8 to tepid reviews and a warm audience reception, if Rotten Tomatoes is to be trusted. Like the original BFGW (2002) and its sequel (2016), the film was written by Nia Vardalos—this time, she also directed—who based it on her 1997 one-woman play about her own Greek-Canadian family.
I’ve seen only BFGW #1, which I remember as pleasant enough. But this post isn’t about the films’ merits or flaws: It’s about that big fat title.
What do we mean when we say something is a big fat something? It can mean the thing is literally big or literally fat, but not necessarily. “Big fat” is idiomatic for “complete” or “utter” or “total”; it can be pejorative (”a big fat lie,” “a big fat NO”) or complimentary (“a big fat honor”). “Fat” amplifies “big” in the same way “great” amplifies “big” in “great big [X]1.”
Some big fat things are truly big and fat.
That name – BIG FAT SAUSAGE. It’s bold, it’s memorable, and it’s bound to make you do a double-take. But that’s the whole point – it grabs your attention. In the world of packaging design, standing out is half the battle, and this brand does it with its name. - Packaging World
“My Big Fat Fabulous Life” is a “reality” TV show about a fat woman—Whitney Way Thore weighed 380 pounds when the series debuted in 2015—living a big life. The show is living a big fat life, too: It’s still airing on TLC.
The Big Fat Notebooks for middle and high school students are indeed big and fat: 500+ pages each. Workman Publishing Co. has owned trademark rights to “Big Fat Notebook” since 2016.
Some big fat things are the target of insult. Comedian and future U.S. Senator Al Franken was, well, perfectly frank about the title of his 1996 essay collection, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.
From Chapter One: “I thought the title, aside from the obvious advantage of being personally offensive to Limbaugh, would sell books. Let me explain why: It makes fun of Rush Limbaugh by pointing out that he is a big lardbutt.”.
Did Franken’s big fat title influence Nia Vardalos’s big fat title six years later? Or was the 2002 film Big Fat Liar, starring Freddie Muniz and Amanda Bynes, a more direct influence? Hard to say. What’s easier to identify is the influence of My Big Fat Greek Wedding on subsequent big fat titles, Greek or otherwise.
There was the short-lived TV series “My Big Fat Greek Life” (February-April 2003), also created by Vardalos and starring many of the actors from the original movie.2 There are the Big Fat Ceremony clones: My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (TV, 2011-2015), My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding (2012-2018), My Big Fat Lesbian Bat Mitzvah (short film 2016). There’s the “approximately annual” running British game show “The Big Fat Quiz of the Year,” running since 2004. There have been numerous Big Fat Greek Restaurants; a Phoenix New Times 2003 review called the Arizona establishment a “big fat Greek tragedy” and “a big fat Greek fraud.”
I wondered how long we’ve been using “big fat” in this amplifying way, so I searched Google Ngrams, which aggregates published materials. The earliest results, from the 1870s, are in children’s books, where “big fat fellows” and “big fat pigs” amble jauntily through grade-school primers. My own first encounter with “big fat” was in the first verse I memorized, the counting rhyme that begins “One, two, buckle my shoe” and rhymes “nine, ten” with “a big fat hen.” (I have since learned that other versions of this rhyme substitute “kill a fat hen.” Yikes.)
“Big fat” was used sparingly until around 1915, when its usage spiked for reasons I’ve yet to determine. Later in the 20th century, there was a spate of sassy children’s and novelty books with “big fat” titles: Garfield Big Fat Joke of Books and Riddles (1965), Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth (1993), Mishmash and the Big Fat Problem (2001). The real surge, of course, came after 2002, when the original My Big Fat Greek Wedding turned an idiom into a much-copied formula, from My Big Fat Greek Diet (2006) and My Big Fat Greek Cookbook (2019) to My Big Fat Independent Movie (2005) and—why limit it to Greeks?—My Sister’s Big Fat Indian Wedding (2022).
And now for a big fat self-promotion: Head over to Medium to read my latest story, “Six Things I’ve Learned from Watching Film Noir.” (That’s a friend link that will bypass the paywall.) As always, I appreciate your comments and claps—you can clap up to 50 times per story: just keep clicking or tapping to add claps.
This [X] is “an unknown quantity” and unrelated to The Entity Still Known to Some of Us Diehards as Twitter.
It gives me considerable immature pleasure to note that one of the recurring BFGW cast members is Joey Fatone, the former NSYNC band member. Yes, his surname is pronounced fah-TONE, not “fat-one.” But still. Brilliant casting decision.