Pizza is a great subject for humor. Because it’s a classic food that can be personally customized, it’s got that “traditional vs. modern” dichotomy going on right there on top of the crust. And then there is the topic of pizza toppings, which lends itself to all kinds of ridiculousness. I answered the question this way in the book The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap (a must-read if you don’t own it already):
and I stand by that, but that’s hard to put into a cartoon.
Metaphors are even worse pizza toppings, but I’ve long tried to get a cartoon published that accomplishes just that. I succeeded in this week’s edition of the New Yorker; the published cartoon is here, and this is the rough version I submitted:
The above cartoon plays off the same idea as this one, which I’ve had rejected a number of times:
But that cartoon is at least better than this one on the topic of self-as-pizza-topping, which nobody will ever, ever see but which was thankfully rejected:
In terms of what the worst-ever pizza topping is, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out. It already exists, and somebody has said it a lot better than myself:
Words, Pictures, Humor 