Losing Louie Anderson, fat comedian (video)

TLAS; Michael Schneider (Variety, 1/21/22); Eds., Wisdom Quarterly REMEMBRANCE

Fat funnyman Louie Anderson made a tremendous first impression on North America when he appeared on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, November 20, 1984.

Body shaming internalized (Robert Ascroft)

Louie Anderson turned his pain into laughter so that we could all cope with family dysfunction

Tribute: Remembering Baskets and Life with Louie star Louie Anderson, who died at 68.

Mara awaits in this cycle called Samsara

[Why do bad people die? Same reason as good people. There is no such thing as lighting a candle that does not subsequently go out. Lighting it is the distal cause of it going out, yet we only ask about the proximate cause, ignoring the inherent nature of impermanent things and our predicament in the phenomenal world. In any case, life goes on. Beings are reborn again and again, ad nauseum. It is peace when this painful cycle finally ends, but there will be millions and millions of lifetimes before then, as there have already been. This is the worldview of the Dharmic religions of the East, particularly Buddhism. People do not understand this and so fear and deny death. Beings do not really die, though they do go from here to arise elsewhere only to pass away again. If only this cycle could be stopped. Meanwhile, plus-sized icon Louie Anderson has died of cancer. This just in: Meatloaf is dead, too. Who will be next? It always comes in threes, the old wives' tales say.]

Hey Mom audiobook (chirpbooks.com)

Many of us first saw Louie Anderson on screen as a flower delivery man in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a cameo role that comes late in the 1986 movie.

But the first time he made an impression on me was in the late 1980s, when Anderson would fill in for Joan Rivers on her short-lived Fox TV talker The Late Show. He was funny, he was engaging and brought a real personality and humanity when he would show up to guest host.

Years later, I asked him about that experience. “When I came to Los Angeles, I had three goals:

1. Do The Tonight Show,
2. get my name on the Comedy Store, and
3. to host my own talk show,”

Anderson told me in 2018. “Really, in the first few years I was able to do all those things. And I loved them all [although] I realized that I did not want to be a talk show host.” More