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"Fat Pizza pizzas, they're big and they're cheesy."
Bobo Gigliotti

A cult Australian comedy series created by Paul Fenech, Pizza is about the local Fat Pizza shop, staffed by a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits like you've never seen. The gang, Pauly, Sleek (Put on a Bus after The Movie), Bobo, Habib and others, get into crazy antics involving drugs, police, bikers and even the supernatural. Set in Western Sydney, it aired from 2000 to 2007.

While rather lowbrow and very, very Australian, which can cause a lot of values dissonance with international audiences, Pizza is a satire of lower-class/working-class Australians, and is definitely worth a look. Here is the first episode, and a good spot from there to find different episodes.

Succeeded by Spiritual Successors Swift & Shift Couriers and Housos.


This show provides examples of:

  • The Alcoholic: Kev the Kiwi. He often bludges off work to go have a drink.
  • Ax-Crazy: Bobo. Easily.
  • Badass Crew: Every member of Fat Pizza qualify for this; to date they have had encounters with aliens, killer kangaroos, bikies, bogans, petty criminals, muggers, drug dealers and/or addicts, dominatrices, celebrities, the CIA, ASIO, the Australian Tax Office, the New South Wales Police Force, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Army, Arab and Asian terrorists, organised crime gangs, and even evil Satanic forces that conspire to bring about the end of the world.
  • Bad Boss: Bobo, to a near unbelievable (and criminal) degree. He pays three dollars an hour and charges for toilet paper at a dollar a sheet (according to Sleek). That is for starters.
  • Beach Episode: A Season 5 episodes, Beach Pizza parts 1 & 2; Also in a Season 3 episode, Cult Pizza.
    • The first season episode, Road Trip Pizza also counts.
  • Biting-the-Hand Humor: The 'Pizza Live' episodes are full of this. The Pizza crew (and the 'cousins') take over the studios and they occasionally drive their teeth into SBS. It is still Played for Laughs though. Les Murray makes an appearance — as a hostage.
  • Black Comedy: WHERE TO BEGIN!?
  • Body Horror: Pauly's uncle's child. It's only an infant, and we never see it in its entirety, but there are warts and all sorts of skin defects.
  • The Bogan: It's an Australian series. You have to expect the odd bogan.
  • Burger Fool: The main cast work a tedious job for a terrible boss who pays AUS$3 an hour (The minimum wage is AUS$15) and often docks them too for things such as toilet paper. Yet they still get into some of the craziest adventures.
  • Butt-Monkey: DJBJ in spades. Pauly gets his fair share of this too.
  • The Casanova: Rocky the Lebanese Rambo is this, as he's never seen without a woman in arm.
  • Casanova Wannabe: Habib, until Season 4 where he gives up, after he hooks up with Toula.
  • Catchphrase:
    • Pauly: "Stooge./!" (Same line with his teacher back in the 80's at High School.)
    • Habib: "Uleh.", "Oh Mah God."
    • Rocky: "Get the cousins!" "Zib." (his own word for 'penis')
    • Bobo: "Get to work!", "Shut up!", "Fat Pizza Pizza's, they're big and they're cheesy." (A slogan that was conceived by Pauly)
    • DJBJ: "You look like a poof, mate.", "DILDO UGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!", "Dickheads!"
    • Aussie Pub Guy (from Beach Pizza, played by Craig Ward): "LET'S GET 'EM!!!"
  • Chainsaw Good: As Pauly tells Davo Dinkum, when Bobo gets out his chainsaw, RUN.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: Oh dear God in heaven; yes.
  • Corrupt Cop: Murray the Cop, who tries to make Pauly's life a living hell by detaining his cars for false excuses such as 'lacking an anti-hoon emissionary filter'.
    • In The Movie, Habib twice drives by police signs (that usually say things like "Now Targeting: Speeding) that say "Now Targeting: Lebanese", and "Now Targeting: Habib"
  • Dude, they're like, asleep on sleeping pills: Habib considers doing it anywhere.
  • Dumbass DJ: DJBJ, although to be fair, everyone else treats him like crap.
  • Groin Attack: In The Movie, Bobo's mother catches him having an erotic dream. She literally smacks the massive boner (thankfully hidden by the blankets) repeatedly. It goes on for several seconds.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: A trait of some of the characters, to parody the nature of Australians themselves.
  • Hot-Blooded: Junior sure has a lot of energy for a pizza chef apprentice from the Pacific Isles.
  • Jerkass: A lot of the characters come off as this, due to the Comedic Sociopathy nature of the series. Usually Bobo and Rocky though.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The nicer characters tend to be this too. For example, Pauly is an affable person, when he's not beating people up or getting into trouble.
  • The Movie: A full length, theater released movie was released in 2003 in Australia, at the height of the series' popularity.
  • Murder by Cremation: The movie has a health inspector who pays a visit to the eponymous Fat Pizza restaurant to shut it down. He makes the terrible mistake of insulting the owner Bobo, who shoves him into the pizza oven he was inspecting. To his credit, his only reaction is to continue deducting points until the oven is finally shut.
  • My Beloved Smother: Bobo's mother is rather controlling of him, although she seems to overlook his psychotic tendencies.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed:
    • The movie by the bucketloads: Ronnie McDoggell as Pizza's version of Ronald McDonald — who is Greek; David Cockerfield as a perverted and silent David Copperfield; Claudia (pronounced by Pauly like Cloud-dia) MacFerson as a Dumb Blonde Claudia McPherson who can't count higher than three; a version of Ivan Milat who is surrounded by idiots who can't realise he's a serial killer until they're dead; a Mahatma Gandhi who trash talks before participating in a boxing match and gets the tar beaten out of him to convert to his real life counterpart's philosophies; a version of Rocky Balboa whose verbal behaviour is heavily exaggerated; and a version of KFC's Colonel Sanders who just falls over and is beaten up by Pauly.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: It can be a frequent occurrence throughout the series. The most notable one is delivered to Sleek and Habib in the movie by three ethnic groups and their own cousins.
  • One-Word Title
  • Put on a Bus: Several characters, from Sleek the Elite to Chong Fat. Unless it's just another bizarre occurrence, DJBJ looked to be heading this way in the Season 5 Finale as well.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits
  • Sharethe Male Pain: In the film when Pauly kicks Ronnie McDoggle "right in the McNuggets", Ronnie's entire clown-gang all double over at the exact same time.
  • Sir Swearsalot: Almost everyone. A notable exception is Bobo.
  • Sound-Effect Bleep: It's all over the series. The most serious swearing is censored by an assortment of sound effects. They range from beeps to bloops, to car horns, to even farm animals.
    • They stopped using the bleep sound in Season 5, so therfore it is the only season being uncensord.
  • Stay in the Kitchen: Rocky the Lebanese Rambo has this attitude.
  • The Stoner: Davo, oh Gods, Davo.
  • Unintelligible Accent: When Lebanese pizza deliverer Habib gets into an altercation with foul-mouthed lifeguard Lifesaver Les, who thinks that Habib and his Lebanese friends want to "own the beach" that they consider theirs by right. Habib has to ask his Hot-Blooded cousin Rocky, "Look, what's he saying? His Australian accent is, like, hard to understand." This moment counts as Hypocritical Humor, because Lifesaver Les' accent is perfectly intelligible to the audience (and to Rocky), but Habib himself has a funny mixed Lebanese-Australian accent which, in itself, counts as unintelligible to Les, because Habib actually wanted to own something that sounds like "beach" in his accent, but is not.
  • Verbal Tic: The movie gives us Ronnie McDoggell, a parody of Ronald McDonald. He uses 'Mc' as a prefix in his speech. His opening line:
    "Oh, you malarka! Look what you did to my Mc-Car! You Mc-beeped it!"
  • Vomit Discretion Shot: Disgustingly subverted. When someone vomits, you get to see the act. The Movie in particular showed Pauly vomiting onto the camera.
  • World of Badass: The series goes to great lengths to show that Australia is the most dangerous place in the world to even go outside.

 
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Ronnie McDoggle

Ronnie McDoggle is a parody of Ronald McDonald. This is the early version of the clown before the movie was released. He ordered his Small Hawaiian Pizzas which he had waited for over an hour.

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