Is Pokey giving Gumby a handy? I'd bet so.

Like the green rubbered fellow that gives the place its namesake, Gumby’s Pizza in Madison has seen better days. Which is basically like a nice way of saying it’s a shitpile, but still; when I went there recently, they had just been raided by the local Pepsi distributor who took all of their Pepsi back due to delinquent bills. The dude working there said it was because corporate didn’t pay a bill (it apparently had nothing to do with him), which is pretty gnarly to think about, since Pepsi apparently has collection people who will come and yank out soda fountains at the drop of a hat. Plus they didn’t actually have pans to serve the pizza on, so we ate ours right out of the box. They did have paper plates at least. But even the fucking stone Gumby they have in there is torn the hell up. Seriously, he looks less put together than Lil Wayne.

But the fact that I had to drink warm tap water out of a sink in back didn’t prevent the place from having some kind of charm; it’s basically the stereotypical stoner delight that can’t really exist elsewhere in Wisconsin. The dude working the oven seemed stoned. The guy working the counter seemed stoned. And they actually laughed about how bad their customer service is, while still seeming somewhat embarrassed about the whole no soda, no pan thing. If it was a Pizza Hut chain in Stevens Point, someone would have shut it down years ago for it being a dump. In Madison, this place could be a local favorite for years.

It somehow went from being horrifically awful to being kind of charming. It’s nice when the guy running the place takes a break from his cigarette break (which happens right on the balcony that overlooks State Street) to ask if he can get you anything else. It’s even better when he pours you a refill of warm tap water out of the sink in back in between laughing at how he can’t understand why anyone would eat there.

The Good: The price, mainly, which is really cheap. There was some kind of deal we got that involved getting a menu item of lesser value for free if you buy a large pizza. To be honest, I never quite got the specifics of the deal because the monumentally stoned delivery driver kept interrupting and making the whole thing seem like they were making shit up as they went along. Which is probably half true. So we got a large pizza and a large order of Pokey Stix for like $15.

The best menu item is the Pokey Stix, which are named after Gumby’s horse/sexual partner (seriously, they had to be fucking each other, right? I mean, who lives with a horse for their whole life and isn’t fucking/being fucked by said horse? Matthew Broderick? HO!). Basically, they’re Toppers Stix with a shit ton of garlic. Which makes them way awesome. The only problem is the whole shitting gallons of garlic six to eight hours after consumption.

The Bad: Gumby’s Pizza (which is apparently a full chain, though I’d never heard of it until I moved here) comes from a sub-genus of pizza I affectionately call the “Hot Garbage Genus.” This pizza fits all the qualities that you expect from pizza (it’s reasonably warm, has cheese, some kind of meat/sauce) but it’s basically garbage. There is a time and place for Hot Garbage pizza, and most of those times involve being broke and/or drunk and/or having no taste buds. Gumby’s is solidly in the middle of the Hot Garbage Genus, slotting somewhere above Pizza Hut, Pizza Pit and Papa John’s, but somewhere below Topper’s (contrary to popular belief, Domino’s doesn’t fit in this genus; it belongs to the “Actual Shit” genus).

Try: The Pokey Stix. And getting a medium Pepsi. It sounds like I’m harping on that point, but I ended up not caring; it was just really, really sad. Going to Gumby’s is like watching an old porn star film a scene; the motions of a pizza place are there, they’re just not able to finish on your face.

Rating: Equal to actually having to watch an episode of Gumby.

Madison, Reviews, Wisconsin