What the War on Drugs was to the 1980s, the War on Weight has become to the new millennium with women drawing sides as supporters, detractors, and front line casualties. But one thing military metaphors can never adequately account for is that for over a century fat has been synonymous with funny.

Comedy is the all-you-can-eat-Vegas- pastery-and-carb- buffet of cellulite culture, evidencing a long history of men and women of a certain girth who relied upon, exploited, and explicitly profitted from yoking their weight to their humor.  The vaudeville circut of the 1890s, which featured variety acts of singers, dancers, and comics, gave rise to formidble figures (literally) such as Marie Dressler, Eva Tanguay, and Trixie Friganza whose performances revolved around their obesity and propensity to play up their self-deprecation for the delight of audiences.  In one show, Marie Dressler literally sat her 220-pound self on her tall, thin, male co-star to the delight and hysterics of the audience (and said co-stars chiropractor). In their wake over the decades came a slew of male and female comics such as Fatty Arbuckle, Jackie Gleason, Chris Farley, Roseanne Bar, and Mo'Nique who flaunted (and continue to flaunt) their size on stage and screen to knee-slapping hilarity or finger wagging disapproval.

Where comedy is concerned, largess comes at a price few consider. The rotund comic inevitably asks, "If I'm fat, will I still be funny?"  Kirstie Alley's latest forray into the War on Weight with her show, Kirstie Alley's Big Life on A&E, hedges around this question and a related one: When is fat no longer funny?

Unlike her Showtime comedy, Fat Actress, where Alley skewered Hollywood politics and cultural standards around women's bodies with satire and wit, Big Life is a personal, more intimate expose on the star's attempt to lose weight and reclaim a body size that is acceptable by her own standards.

In the last few years, Alley has not only been open about her weight struggles, but has taken a tact familiar to many comediennes or comic performers: She has used humor and comedy to make her weight challenges both palatable and digestible for herself and the public (puns only partially intended). 

From talking candidly about her "stupid reasons" for getting fat, to joking around about using actor/musician/comedian Jaime Foxx as a muse, to filming cheeky and playful promos for her show where she portrays a conversation between a Devil and Angel battling over a three-tiered, pink-frosted cake (the Devil-Alley declares "My motto: Life. Lick it!" as she leans in to humorously and provocatively tongue a bit of frosting), Alley's humor and its ability to make both the actress and her weight issues accessible and relatable separates her from other weight loss icons such as Oprah or Queen Latifa.

However, it might not be Alley who is having the last laugh in Big Life, a show that highlights the lonely, depressing, embittering side of weight struggle that does a disservice to Alley's ability to empower through laughter and to those looking to this show for inspiration and support. 

If the "fat is funny" comic model has started to sour Americans' palettes than Alley's show is an example of the challenge facing celebrity women in general and comediennes in particular of how to use humor to tackle body image issues without taking yourself down in the process.