They’re Big and They’re Cheezy

Fat Pizza is back! Well, kind of. There’s a pizza shop, Bobo (John Boxer) waves around a chainsaw, Sleek the Elite (Paul Nakad) is shown in a couple of clips that quite possibly could have come from last season, and there’s yet another version of that “subwoofa” song. What more do you need?

Before anyone can say “I dunno, some comedy?”, let’s remember it’s Fat Pizza we’re talking about here. Oh wait, wasn’t Fat Pizza the one halfway decent franchise from the House of Paul Fenech? While Housos started shit and fell apart from there, and Swift & Shift was just Pizza with slightly fewer ethnic stereotypes, Fat Pizza used to be… okay, not good, but not completely shithouse.

(“Not completely shithouse” – Australian Tumbleweeds)

What made the original Pizza and Fat Pizza work – yeah, yeah, “work” – was that it featured a cast of mildly distinct characters. That meant there were subplots. It wasn’t just Fenech running around bumping into various comedy grotesques for a scene then running off to the next scene featuring a new comedy freak. Which is all Fenech’s been making for the last few years now and much like the pizzas, it’s getting pretty stale.

Possibly this extremely dull plot structure has been forced on him by coronavirus. Considering the first episode of the all new Fat Pizza features a bunch of crowd scenes, possibly not. As a creative choice it’s a bit strange, but this is a series that has to spend half of the first episode undoing the cliffhanger from the previous season, which also had to spend half its first episode undoing the cliffhanger from the season before that, and that season opened with Fenech’s character escaping from a sex dungeon after fifteen years. Guess you got to follow your muse.

Okay, so there’s less plot, less regular characters, less new characters (Pauly doesn’t even hire any new staff for the pizza shop this time) and not as many “big name” cameos; what’s left? Well, there’s an extended scene where Pauly wrestles with a roid’ed out white supremacist woman who doesn’t like pineapple on her pizza but who does have a massively enlarged clit due to the steroids. Does Pauly win the fight by biting it? Hey, if we had to watch it, you have to read about it.

It’s possible some of this could be funny in an “I can’t believe what I’m watching” fashion, but Paul Fenech has been doing this stuff for so long now that even when he’s shocking there’s no shock left. A shocking episode of Fat Pizza would (have some jokes? – ed) be one where the comedy was based even slightly on characters rather than Fenech opening a door and being confronted by some “outrageous” character or activity for the sixth time in twenty minutes.

The first Fat Pizza movie was on television a few months ago, and while the bar for Australian comedy films is pretty low – thanks in part to Fenech’s later efforts – it wasn’t all bad. It was basically a series of skits, but they weren’t all the same skit. The ethnic stereotypes seemed at least slightly grounded in reality (the African Gangs in the current run of Fat Pizza, not so much), it took wild turns that didn’t always involve someone getting their dick out, and there was more going on than just Fenech running around pulling faces.

Fenech’s forgotten the ingredients that made Fat Pizza work. All that’s left now is sour dough.