Phagomania: The Pizza Collection interview

Do you remember those awful music compilations from late night TV ad breaks? Short snippets of song would fly by as we learned about an indispensable collection of lone-driving, ultimate love-making, or country line-dancing anthems.

An American duo have been busy covering a breadth of genres transforming hits into a fictitious ‘Pizza Collection’. Endless cover songs, with lyrics changed to be about pizza? Bear with us on this one, for it’s the sheer relentlessness and ridiculousness that starts tickling the funny bones. Much like Stewart Lee talking about crisps for 10 minutes, the trick seems to be to keep repeating the gag until you’ve won everybody over.

Highlights among the insistent pizza punnery are a take on Macy Gray's I Try ("though I try to hide it, it's clear, I eat pizza when you are not there"), The Lion King's Hakunah MaPizza, Queen's Another Stuffed Pizza Crust, and the epic West Side Story parody My Pizza ("I'll never stop eating my pizza").

We talked to creators (ahem, sorry, "sales associates") Sam Wachs & Will Drinker to find out more – they were dead set on staying in character as two ardent employees of US mail-order institution Time Life pushing their fictitious ‘Pizza Collection’ product. So what’s it all about?

“Do you remember the songs of the pizza shop?” they chime. “Of course you do! But now you don’t have to because all your favorite pizza songs are finally available in one collection for your listening pleasure! What’s a pizza song? It’s a song about pizza, of course! What’s a pizza? Are you serious!?”

"With Time Life’s Pizza Collection, enjoy over eight hours of feel-good pizza songs, covering all genres, decades, and toppings – without having to track down the original 45s and 8-track tapes. Doesn’t it feel good to have all the hit pizza classics in one place so you can listen to them without a compact disc player? Order today!”

Okay, but why pizza? “Pizza is not just international,” they retort, "it’s universal, the only food synonymous with the word ‘Party!’” Right, we can see where this is going.

Wachs & Drinker have brought the concept to life by sharing live bills with unfortunate, aspiring singer-songwriters. “‘Time Life Pizza Collection: Live!’ is a presentation of selected songs from the collection by our enthusiastic sales reps,” they explain.

And does it go down as well as a slice of pizza pie? We reckon you'll either love or hate it, but we'll give the Collection the last word: “The most common response is, ‘Where can I buy this? I’ll pay anything!’ If this is how you feel too, simply make out a cashier’s check to ‘The Time Life Pizza Collection’, put it in the mail, and it WILL get to us. You can count on that!”

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