Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live touched on an issue that will probably lead to a heated Twitter debate. No, it wasn’t any of the actual reporting from "Weekend Update." It wasn’t even a political sketch about Trump. In a courtroom sketch from Saturday’s episode, host James Franco raised a surprisingly good point about the term 'za,' which some of us use as an abbreviation for pizza.
In the sketch, James Franco plays a lawyer who is trying to accuse Pete Davidson's character of murder. However, he goes about it in an unlikely way. Franco starts his interrogation by addressing the judge, who is played by Keenan Thompson. He says, "Your Honor, the prosecution would like to cross-examine the witness." He then asks the witness to clarify where he was on "the night in question." That's when Davidson responds by explaining, "Like I already said, I was at Vinny's having two slices of za."
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Any viewer who has ever cringed upon hearing someone use that completely unnecessary abbreviation for pizza may expect the lawyer played by Franco to begin berating Davidson's character simply for saying it. However, the lawyer instead claims that the witness's use of the term is evidence that he was not actually at Vinny's eating pizza that night. Why? Because he thinks za is short for lasagna, which Vinny's does not serve.
Franco's character, then switches gears from attempting to prove that the witness is guilty to proving that za should be short for lasagna instead of pizza. He insists, "You don't make nicknames based on how things are spelled. You make them on how they sound." Franco hilariously spits out the various syllables in the words lasagna and pizza over and over to make his point. He even pulls out a poster board to illustrate how the words are broken down phonetically. In the end, what seemed like an absurd distraction from the actual investigation turns out to help prove that the witness is lying. Take a look:
Hopefully now people will see that the term za is at best, confusing and at worst, downright annoying and will finally stop employing the nickname all together. Although, we'll probably just end up with another pizza-related Twitter feud.