Column Chronicles: Speech for the Pizza Lovers Convention

Speech for the Pizza Lovers Convention

Frank Cotolo
February 9, 2023

Good evening ladies, gentlemen and kids of some ages. My name is Frank and I'm here to welcome you to the first convention for pizza lovers. [applause]. I see a diverse audience and that is good because long ago pizza was only available to the poorest people in Italy. It's true. The origins of pizza are found in its definition.

In Italian it simply means pie. Any baked bread with stuff on it or inbetween it is a pizza. That changes the perception of pizza on the world stage. But its founders only spoke Italian and so they called it a pie - a pizza. Once popular in English-speaking countries, people said it was a "pizza pie", which translates into Italian as a "pie pie".

Don't say pizza pie. It's like saying ink pen. Yes, all pens write with ink so never say ink pen because you are saying pen pen. Anyone would laugh at you if you said you use a pen pen. It's like saying I have a puppy dog. A puppy is a young dog, so saying puppy dog is saying young dog or dog dog. You get it? [applause]

You love pizza because it is simple and yet it fills you up and often puts weight on you. Original Italian pizza can make you big fat. See what I did there? I said big fat when being fat is being big so I was saying fat fat. No one says someone is fat fat.

How much pizza do you eat? Let me see a show of hands. That's a lot of hands. We must have a full house [laughter, applause].

Another dumb thing is to eat gourmet pizza. As I said, pizza was created for people who did not have money to buy lots of food so they put anything they could eat on top of dough and cooked it. It's a poor-person's food, so how could there be gourmet pizza? Anyone can make a pizza with any ingredient and that is not true with gourmet food. So don't let some snobby cook charge you a lot for pizza no matter what is in it. [shouts and screams then applause and then Frank waves and says goodnight.]

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.