The Cultural Supremacy of Pizza

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Supreme Pizza, or Pizza Supreme?

I became fascinated with a tweet I saw the other day:

Cullen Crawford is one of my favorite Twitter follows. His jokes are sharp, his output is precise, and his observations are incisive in a way that usually transcends the joke itself. I wanted to hear more, so I reached out.

“I tweet about pizza a lot cause there is something funny to me about a food we’ve all decided is cool. It started with me doing a joke about imagining the Ninja Turtles being obsessed with omelets instead of pizza, and people were replying with alts and I was dying laughing,” Cullen wrote. “Why is them liking pizza cool but not yogurt or roast beef?” 

Pizza is so ingrained in movies as the default good-time signifier that I hadn’t even considered that there was a time when that wasn’t the case. But on reflection, it makes sense: You don’t see Jimmy Stewart drunkenly trying to order pizza delivery in “The Philadelphia Story” after he gets his load on while poolside at a rich lady’s estate, but it’s something you’d 100% expect Seth Rogen to do if he played that role in a modern remake. 

In “TV Guide”’s 50 Classic Pizza Scenes In Movies, almost every entry casts pizza as a ubiquitous party food, or at the very least as a special treat. A plain cheese pizza is Kevin’s obsession in “Home Alone,” the dehydrated instant food in “Back To The Future II” is a pizza, Sandra Bullock orders delivery pizza on a computer in “The Net,” and of course, the “Bio-Dome” fellas go nuts for the stuff. The only pre-’80s pulls on that list suggest that Cullen is right—“Fast Times” probably did kick off a vibe shift. Pizza’s context before then—John Travolta stuffing slices in his mouth on the street in “Saturday Night Fever,” or Dustin Hoffman negotiating food for his hostages in “Dog Day Afternoon”—was a little less super fun party time, a little more, well, bleak. 

“If I had to theorize, it’s that it was one of the few foods you could get delivered which made it a party food, it was also one of the few (white, American) communal foods you could get back in the day,” Cullen offered. “It’s relatively cheap which makes it good for dirtbags, college kids, stoners, etc. And it tastes good as hell.”

But if pizza’s cultural supremacy debuted in 1982 with “Fast Times,” what came before it?

“I feel like it was coffee and pie then burgers and shakes and then pizza. Now it’s ... I don’t know. What is cool food now? Stew? I’m gonna say all the teens are eating stew.”

Stew can be made in big enough batches to feed a group,  and it’s often cheap and tastes good as hell, but it’s low on sex appeal.  There’s something in the fact of pizza’s insouciance—it requires no utensils, and hell, you don’t even really need a plate. Then there’s the fact that no other crowd-pleasing food is more associated with delivery than pizza. 

Delivery plays a key part in most famous pizza movie scenes, including in those aforementioned films. Not only is pizza reflected in the cultural lexicon of the average American family when ordering in a cheap meal, but pizza delivery is also an easy way to create scene work: You’ve got time passing between an order being called in and the food showing up; you’ve got the extra, potentially chaotic element of a delivery driver inserting themselves in the scene; and you’ve got a perfect MacGuffin to force all the characters to come together and interact. In the case of “Do The Right Thing,” pizza delivery becomes the catalyst for the movie’s entire dramatic arc.

The history of pizza delivery in the United States is also tied directly to the history of the industrialization of food products. Pizza Hut was founded in 1958 and began franchising locations by 1959; Domino’s started in 1960 and began franchising in 1967. By the mid-to-late ’70s, both chains had hundreds of locations around the country. Industrialization made that possible: If all your ingredients come pre-packed from a distributor, it’s easier for each store to replicate the exact flavor of original recipes and limited-edition specials. Those changes happened against the backdrop of an expanding middle class post-WWII, one that favored the suburbs, making delivery more essential than ever before. 

That all helps us get to the how, but the why is still dangling. Pizza in movies isn’t just overly prevalent compared to other foods—it’s the quintessential party food. 

“Any time I write a party scene, there HAS to be a spinning turntable with a pizza on it,” Cullen said. 

It must be true that pizza’s party culture is tied to Jeff Spicoli in “Fast Times At Ridgemont High.” Spicoli exists as the Ur stoner: the concrete embodiment of the chilled-out, SoCal surfer dude who burns the doobie. In 1982, this wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. Instead, Spicoli represents two decades of surf culture crammed into a single caricature, one whose effortless cool is undeniable, if not a little over-the-top. When he gets pizza delivered to class, Spicoli’s stoner pastiche directly collides with the rapid expansion of pizza delivery built off of suburban excess and prosperity, and a new association is born. For many kids in the early 1980s, maybe the easiest way to be like Spicoli was to order pizza. Getting your hands on a Baja hoodie and good California weed was much harder than convincing your parents to dial up Domino’s. 

If pizza was the heart of cool in the 1980s, though, that allure hasn’t ever faded.

“Pizza has an almost ironic detachment to how awesome it is, like surfing, or neon or cool cars, or the word awesome. I think foods have their ‘moments’ now and then: backlash, then backlash to the backlash etc., but nothing fucking owns the way pizza does. It is the big dog,” said Cullen.

Enter the never-ending loop of pizza being cool, then ironically cool, then extrapolated into an outlandish stereotype of cool, then ironically extrapolated into an outlandish stereotype of cool, and so on and so forth until its usage in film became indistinguishable from its usage in comedy sketches designed to lampoon that same type of film. Even outside of that dynamic, there are so many other ways pizza has dominated pop culture that there’s room for each new signifier to breathe until it gets recycled over and over. 

But if there’s anything worth taking away from all of this, it’s that nothing is funnier than imagining the Ninja Turtles going wild and celebrating with their own tubs of yogurt, shouting “Cowabunga!” between shoveling big, gloppy spoonfuls into their gross weird mouths, and cheering.

You can find Cullen Crawford on Twitter at @hellocullen.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.