this is freaking hilarious.
GUY FIERI IS AMERICA’S KRUSTY THE CLOWN reposted from sethmad.com
BY SETH MADEJ
Chef Guy Fieri rocketed to a sad, modern version of superstardom thanks to Food Network and despite his
continuing devotion to the music of Sammy Hagar. He’s now deep into his return trajectory, plunging through the selloutosphere, spraying a trail of Ed Hardy flames, his last traces of respectability burned away. Fieri has become a real-life version of the ultimate celebrity marketing strumpet, The Simpsons Krusty the Clown. As Krusty is to comedy, Guy is to food — a living cartoon, a face to be plastered on any product presented to him alongside a slow-cooker full of coin, a hollow symbol of grub for which quality is no object.
The first hints of Fieri’s decline appeared last November with the opening and subsequent New York Times kebabing of his massive Times Square mothership, and Guy’s American Kitchen Bar,1 but his Krustydom has been ensured with the release of his latest frozen food-style product, Guy Fieri’s S’mores Indoors Pizza.
The S’mores, labeled as “a gourmet pizza made witha sweet graham cracker crust, rich melted chocolate, semi sweet chocolate chips and fluffy marshmallow miniatures,” sounds appealing enough that I’d be tempted to eat it tonight as my third dinner. But according to the food blog Serious Eats, the pizza surpasses everyday grossness to achieve a level of negligent and potentially hazardous awfulness achieved only by jagged metal Krusty-O’s or eye-searing Krusty Brand Personal Swabs.
Product reviews on the Sam’s Club web site claim that the pizza tastes awful, endangers your safety when you heat it up and, worst of all, burns the throats of anyone unfortunate enough to ingest it, due to some peppery component unlisted on the ingredient label:
This is the worst thing I have ever bought. There was something very hot in it that burned our tongue and throat.
Marshmellow [sic] melted and fell down into the bottom of both ovens and smoked the entire kitchen/dining room area up
You remember those ads in the back of comic books for pepper-flavored gum you could give out as a practical joke? I think this is “Guy Fieri”‘s version of that.
These complaints don’t come from foodies looking to rip apart a dude who’s admittedly become a gastronomic pariah. The second comment above was written by a woman who bought the pizzas to serve as dessert at a church dinner. In fact, the most infuriating part of this disaster is that the people buying and hating this product picked it up specifically because they thought that if Guy says it’s good, it must be good. Take reviewer SueZQ:
We purchased this product because it looked delicious on the box and had Guy Fieri’s name on it. I can’t believe he would put his name on this awful stuff! The actual product had barely any marshmallows. The marshmallows that were near the edges slid off and burned on the bottom of the oven. The taste was strange, and burned our throats (all 4 family members!). I don’t recommend it at all!
Poor Sue was not just disappointed but actually harmed by a product she bought because it was endorsed by someone she likes and trusts.
Therein lies the heart of Fieri’s Krustyness. It’s not the selling out; it’s not the marketing of inferior merchandise. It’s the lack of respect or concern for the folks that made him famous enough to enable him to take their money. Guy has — thanks to some combination of laziness, apathy, greed, or turpitude — enticed his fans into buying by a possibly dangerous product by using his name and image to assure them of its quality. In so doing, he’s telling SueZQ that her cash is more important to him than she is.
Is there any worse thing someone can do with his celebrity?
- Which materialized just a few feet from my old office, a new singularity in a epicurean black hole so vast that leaving my building for lunch required a trek across two crosstown blocks to get a decent slice of pizza.