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

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Lasagna Versus Pizza, or, Turtles Killed The Lasagna Star

Made by: Sloublues

Explanation

This comic is unexplained. If you can edit this page to provide an explanation, please do!

The author writes:

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

{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

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.