Pizza Biz: Pizza Hall of Shame

Remembering when Pizza Hut hired the grossest man to sell their grossest invention

When did things get so bad? It’s a question that many of us ask ourselves daily as we scroll through images of genocides, government terrorism, and encroaching fascism. Was it the election of Obama, an event so triggering for racists (i.e. Americans) that it turned the dial of progress back 50 years? Was it 9/11 and the ensuing nationalism that pushed us toward unquestioning fealty to the state? Was it Reagan, who set about killing the middle class by creating wealth division so pronounced and ubiquitous that white men still believe that success is akin to a birthright?

(The answer, of course, is always Reagan).

All those are true. But in the middle of all that, there’s an event that many have forgotten, and it’s no less damning.

On March 25, 1995, Pizza Hut unveiled an advancement in pizza technology that changed our cultural fabric: stuffed crust pizza. By rolling the outer edge of the pizza dough over a ring of cheese before baking it, they had succeeded in solving the eternal question of: where can we put more cheese? Pizza Hut proved scientists and skeptics wrong. They had found it. Stuffed crust was Pizza Hut’s Lost City of Atlantis.

To introduce the world to this breakthrough, they needed a bold campaign fitting for such a momentous event.

They got Donald and Invana Trump.

Three years prior, Donald and Invana had gone through a very public and acrimonious divorce, which, unsurprisingly, was on the grounds of “cruel and inhumane” treatment by Donald. But rich people love attention, so like fame-hungry moths to a gauche and vulgar flame, the two agreed to appear in Pizza Hut’s first stuffed-crust commercial.

The commercial, with its softcore lighting and soap opera acting, shows the two about to engage in some forbidden tryst, acting in “the wrong way”. And just as we think they’re talking about getting back together, we find out they’re going to eat pizza crust-first. Very funny. Good stuff(ed).

We love our stuffed crust

This commercial feels like a premonition. Ignoring the rules, bragging about bad behavior, shirking integrity in favor of attention and money are signature moves of the Trump we know, and it was all right there in the commercial. Thirty years ago, he ate pizza “the wrong way”, and now that’s how he runs the country. The cheese-pull might as well be the threads of humanity, stretched thin.

It’s been nearly three decades since I last had Pizza Hut stuffed crust, but what I remember is that it’s gross as fuck. Just a lukewarm tube of rubbery cheese. Which is also a fitting description of a man we’ve elected twice to the highest position in the world.