Daisy May Cooper has said that people told her she “wasn’t funny any more” after losing weight.
The This Country star and co-creator is currently appearing in BBC series Am I Being Unreasonable?, which she also wrote.
In a new interview, Cooper said that she’d lost weight because she was “unhappy” with her health, but found herself receiving unexpected messages afterwards.
“I’m so for body positivity but when I was at my biggest I was at my most miserable and I had a massive food addiction,” she said. “I wasn’t healthy. I couldn’t breathe when I was walking up the stairs. I was so unhappy.
“I’ve had some messages like, ‘Well, now you’ve lost the weight you’re not funny any more.’ What the f***? Why do women have to be f***ing fat to be funny? That makes me so angry.”
The Never Mind the Buzzcocks panellist added: “I champion anybody. I think everybody should be happy with their body. But I wasn’t.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cooper said that a differing sense of humour from her ex-husband, with whom she shares two young children, had played a part in their 2021 divorce.
“I was with a man, as wonderful as he is, who didn’t find This Country funny. It wasn’t his sense of humour,” she said.
“It’s like, how can I possibly be with a man who doesn’t find my comedy funny? That’s f***ing mad! And he deserves better than me because he has things he needs that I can’t give him.”
Cooper wrote This Country with her brother Charlie about their lives growing up in the Cotswolds.
You can read The Independent’s five-star review of Am I Being Unreasonable? here.
