4697: Lasagna Versus Pizza, or, Turtles Killed The Lasagna Star

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Lasagna Versus Pizza, or, Turtles Killed The Lasagna Star
4697.png
Made by: Sloublues


Explanation[edit | edit source]

The author writes:[edit | edit source]

As calculated by looking for "lasagna" and "pizza" in tag and transcription search engines, located at lasagna.cz, through the end of 2020. (The site probably also inspired me to jazz up the presentation a bit.) 143 strips are tagged with lasagna, 196 tagged with pizza. I also looked at the transcription search and found a few strips that were not tagged with pizza for one reason or another. The grand total, then, is 143 strips that mention or feature lasagna, and 203 pizza strips. Using the transcription search, for the record, returns 123 strips for lasagna and 187 for pizza.

These results were combined to produce the top plot above. I certainly appreciate the work done by whomever is or are behind the website.

The second plot plots the cumulative appearances of lasagna and pizza. The third attempts to reduce year-to-year noise by plotting the average number of appearances per year of each food as a function of decade, starting with 1978-1980 (average 9â…“ lasagna strips per year during this period) and continuing with 1981-1990 etc.

Comments!

You can see how pizza comes to dominate by the '90s, reflecting how often the gag involves ordering pizza and how little anyone remembers lasagna anymore. Ordering pizza, a standard low-effort means of procuring dinner in America, perhaps reflects how lazy the strip has become, as well as (later) the emphasis on turning Jon into a generic lazy bachelor who forgot how to do anything in the kitchen once he and Liz became an item.

Pizza sees a big spike in 1999 in part due to 6 strips in a row in late November, at the time of American Thanksgiving. The fact that the comic focused on pizza rather than Jon serving a turkey with all the fixings was, in retrospect, an omen of what was to come in the new millennium (see hand-wringing in previous paragraph).

Going further back, pizza first spikes in 1988, likely reflecting an attempt to be hip by following the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series that debuted the previous year.

The search engine I used returns 100 results per page, which made it obvious that both transcription search terms reach their 100th mention in 2009. After this year, pizza is mentioned more than three times as often as lasagna.

Using the tags to add strips where food is depicted but nobody speaks of it, pizza catches up to lasagna in 2011. Lasagna now tallies its 100th appearance in 1997, whereas pizza reaches triple digits in 2008. Reasons for this difference or lack thereof, as contrasted with the transcription search, are left as an exercise for the reader.

The regression on the third chart indicates that every single strip will feature pizza when Garfield is about 192-193 decades old. By that time, the cat will have been rebooted so much that his current incarnation will be a prince of Denmark unhinged by his father's betrayal of the Emperor to the Dark Side.

The only strip I noticed that features both pizza and lasagna is 1982-08-19.

Original strips: 1978-07-15, 1981-11-06, 1982-08-19.

Transcript[edit | edit source]

{A bar graph containing the following data}
Incidence of Lasagna vs. Pizza over time

Year Lasagna Pizza
1978 10 0
1979 10 0
1980 8 0
1981 11 1
1982 8 2
1983 7 0
1984 4 2
1985 3 1
1986 8 2
1987 11 3
1988 5 8
1989 5 3
1990 3 3
1991 0 5
1992 2 3
1993 1 1
1994 0 4
1995 2 3
1996 1 4
1997 2 7
1998 0 1
1999 1 14
2000 2 3
2001 0 2
2002 1 4
2003 0 2
2004 4 1
2005 3 13
2006 0 3
2007 3 2
2008 2 12
2009 4 7
2010 1 4
2011 2 13
2012 2 3
2013 3 4
2014 2 11
2015 3 6
2016 1 9
2017 1 7
2018 4 12
2019 1 11
2020 2 7

{In the background, Garfield digs into his first lasagna}
{A second graph, plotting cumulative counts}
Cumulative Lasagna vs. Pizza over time

Year Lasagna Pizza
1978 10 0
1979 20 0
1980 28 0
1981 39 1
1982 47 3
1983 54 3
1984 58 5
1985 61 6
1986 69 8
1987 80 11
1988 85 19
1989 90 22
1990 93 25
1991 93 30
1992 95 33
1993 96 34
1994 96 38
1995 98 41
1996 99 45
1997 101 52
1998 101 53
1999 102 67
2000 104 70
2001 104 72
2002 105 76
2003 105 78
2004 109 79
2005 112 92
2006 112 95
2007 115 97
2008 117 109
2009 121 116
2010 122 120
2011 124 133
2012 126 136
2013 129 140
2014 131 151
2015 134 157
2016 135 166
2017 136 173
2018 140 185
2019 141 196
2020 143 203

{In the background, Garfield is about to bite into his first pizza when he sees Jon coming}
{A third graph, depicting average counts per year as a function of decade}
Lasagna versus Pizza by decade

Decade Lasagna Pizza
1978-80 9.33 0
1981-90 6.5 2.5
1991-2000 1.1 4.5
2001-10 1.8 5.0
2011-20 2.1 8.3

{There is a regression line attached to the pizza data:}
y = 1.91x - 1.67, R2 = 0.9607.
{In the background is a strip with Jon at the supermarket}
Jon: One frozen lasagna
Jon: Two frozen pizzas
Jon {pulling a frozen Garfield out of the food cabinet}: One frozen pasta freak

Trivia[edit | edit source]

There is a slight mojibake error in the third paragraph of the author's notes, created as a result of a later site recoding effort; the original version of that paragaraph unaffected by mojibake is currently lost to the public as a result of these errors.