These things happen
The show, on the air since 2003, is called QI and the letters stand for Quite Interesting. IMDB describes QI as:
A comedy panel game in which being Quite Interesting is more important than being right. Sandi Toksvig is joined each week by four comedians to share anecdotes and trivia, and maybe answer some questions as well.
One thing you learn after watching a few episodes is that the first answer you think of, indeed, the one you are sure is correct, is absolutely going to be wrong. QI will teach you about things you didn’t know, challenge your assumptions, make you think, and, above all, make you laugh.
But that’s not why I wanted to write about it today.
There’s something rather subversive going on over there at QI. It’s something glaringly obvious to an American, at any rate. Very few of the panelists are conventionally attractive. There’s a variety of body types and ages. In all of the episodes I have watched, I can only think of two panelists who’d be considered “acceptable” on American television. Even so, the woman would probably be told to lose weight.
The longer I watch, the more that the implications of this disturb me. These quirky, funny, and smart panelists make the show the success it is and their physical appearance is completely irrelevant. It makes me realize how much innate talent is weeded out by the entertainment industry in the U.S. purely because of irrational standards of “beauty.”
All you have to do is look around in your own life to see that the best people you know - - the kindest, bravest, smartest, most talented - - very rarely look like the people on television or in film. We’ve been put on a steady diet of prepackaged attractiveness to the point where anyone who deviates even remotely from this “norm” attracts negative scrutiny.
Those who aspire to a career in television or film must then necessarily aspire to unnatural and often artificial bodies. And think of all the young people making videos at home that are desperate attempts to look like the folks on television. Unhealthy diets. Punishing workout regimes. Tricks of the camera. Digital manipulation.
Do any of those things make you more talented? Are any of those things conducive to creating great art?
No.
But they create and reinforce a culture where all that matters is how you look and that you are fair game for criticism and abuse if you stray from “Hollywood” expectations. And they teach onlookers to devalue the beauty in the vast diversity of human beings around us. How many amazing people are discounted and rejected for factors that have nothing to do with talent?
And what does that teach us? And our children?
QI is by no means a perfect show. There may be an inordinate amount of humor surrounding male body parts and I feel like they have a bit too much fun “doing foreign accents” for laughs. It’s a product of a colonialist and class-inflexible culture and assumptions of privilege are never too far away, although they are as much the topic of ridicule as not.
Still, watching and enjoying something on television where the stars are too short, too tall, too chubby, too old, too funny looking, too plain, too skinny, too ordinary…and it doesn’t matter is nothing short of revolutionary. To be clear: there isn’t anything wrong with them. There’s something wrong with how we have been taught to “see.”
We don’t have to be like this. It could be different.
How many potentially brilliant artists get thrown away because we demand that a career in entertainment means becoming something you are not?
I don’t have the answer. But just contemplating it could be quite interesting.
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