For six minutes and eight seconds a petite blonde woman bounced around on a YouTube screen bullying overweight people with the most cliché and nasty comments.
The petite blonde woman is Nicole Arbour, and her video, “Dear Fat People,” has garnered more than six million views.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not going to delve too much into the legitimacy of her fat-shaming and the people Arbour offended with this video but rather her reasons for making the video.
Arbour is famous for her time as a Toronto Raptors cheerleader and her guest work on NBC’s short lived “Howie Do It.” Oh wait, did I say famous? I meant incredibly unimportant.
Arbour is like the West Borrow Baptist Church and ISIS. Not that she’s calling dead soldiers “faggots” or chopping off people’s heads, but she doesn’t care if she gets positive or negative attention. She just wants people to notice her.
Before “Dear Fat People,” Arbour’s most watched video was “The History Of: BRAS,” with more than 470,000 views, which was basically just a montage of her wearing different bras, so there’s no wonder people clicked on it.
But even a guy getting hit in the face with an exercise ball has more views than Arbour’s bra video, so she needed to spice things up a little bit. One thing that gets people’s attentions more than sex and violence is offensive statements.
Seriously, Kramer from “Seinfeld” calling an audience member the N-word nine years ago at the Laugh Factory still has more views than most of Arbour’s videos.
“Dear Fat People” isn’t even funny. It’s just shocking, and shock comedy isn’t about the jokes but rather the reaction. The whole video and all of Arbour’s jokes lack any kind or cleverness or substance. Her first “joke” toward overweight people is that if they tried to chase her, they’d look like Frankenstein.
Frankenstein moves slowly.
(Crickets)
She then goes on to say, “They forgot to tell you ‘plus size’ stands for plus heart disease, plus knee problems, plus diabetes.”
(Even the crickets don’t care at this point)
Since Arbour released the video two weeks ago there have been thousands of response videos. If you type in “dear fat people response” on YouTube you get more than 43,000 results.
Arbour has appeared on “The View” as a guest, and according to the online news source International Business Times, Arbour gained at least 30,000 subscribers in the week after the video hit YouTube.
She’s blowing up.
Arbour loves the fact people hate her. She’s like Randy Orton from the WWE. She feeds off other people’s backlash and uses it to her advantage, and in the midst of all the hatred, she’s bound to pick up some supporters as well.
When you think about it, “Dear Fat People,” is just plain sad, not only for the people Arbour offended but for Arbour herself. It’s 2015, and people are done with the whole “dumb-blonde” joke Arbour is known for, so now she has to create hate speech just to get clicks on her videos.
Being a cheerleader with a horrible standup routine isn’t a way to be successful, so from the bottom of my heart, Nicole, I’m sorry that you had to stoop to this level to get the world to notice you.
Email Griffin Kelly at opinions@cardinalpointsonline.com
