YouTuber Shane Dawson once alleged something about Chuck E. Cheese pizza that few people who heard it can forget. If you’re a fan of their food and haven’t heard his conspiracy theory yet, look out — it will change your cheesy world of pizza joy.
Despite Shane Dawson popularizing the theory in 2019, it re-emerged in a recent video uploaded on X which has over 6 million views in one day.
The brief viral video — which makes the false claim that Chuck E. Cheese sued Shane Dawson — won’t be helpful to anyone who isn’t already in the know, since it’s just Dawson and a friend expressing disbelief while looking at Chuck E. Cheese pizza. However, once you know the theory, you will easily notice what they notice.
So what’s Shane Dawson’s Chuck E. Cheese pizza conspiracy theory, already?
Have you ever ordered pizza at a Chuck E. Cheese and ended up with a pie whose slices seem like they don’t quite fit together? Well, Shane Dawson and others have speculated that Chuck E. Cheese makes their pizza pies partly with uneaten slices left behind by other customers.
If you watch the lengthy Shane Dawson video in detail — which has 49 million views — you’ll notice one or two slices seem wider than the others, and a couple might even be longer than the others, to the point that the crust doesn’t even remotely match up. Dawson claimed that often times the pie itself just looks like it was not made as one pie, but thrown together in pieces.
When Dawson first discussed this conspiracy theory, it took off and became so popular that Chuck E. Cheese actually responded to a post on Twitter (remember that platform?) that questioned the restaurant chain about it. They replied that theory is “unequivocally false.”
However, they probably should’ve left it at that, because their explanation as to why the slices are disproportionate make little sense, stating, “Our pizzas are made to order and we prepare our dough fresh in restaurant, which means that they’re not always perfectly uniform in shape.”
Many pizzerias make their dough fresh, but their pies are perfectly shaped. Of course, this doesn’t prove Dawson’s theory, but that explanation does nothing to disprove it.
So, we had to look elsewhere. What about former employees? Have they said anything online?
Most we found say that the other workers there were just quickly cutting the pieces and not caring about the dimensions of the slices. One former employee claimed, “I had never in my time working there ever put a pizza together that was a pizza from a table that didn’t eat it. Never.”
Some apparent former employees responded to various YouTube videos saying that the conspiracy theory is not factual at all. One pointed out that part of Dawson’s theory was based on a pie that was half pepperoni and half cheese because it looks like two different pies put together. Well, it is. As the employee explained, when it’s busy they just make full cheese pies and full pepperoni pies and when they get orders for half pepperoni then they combine the two halves from their whole pizzas.
Furthermore, Buzzfeed did a video about the theory in which a Chuck E. Cheese manager explained that the reason for the slices appearing disproportionate is that while most pizzerias will cut your pie just before serving, Chuck E. Cheese cuts it much earlier in the process and, by the time it’s served, it may look uneven simply because it has moved around a lot.
However, the manager doesn’t directly answer all of the questions asked by the Buzzfeed reporter, Eric Tabach, but does say that the theory is completely false. It doesn’t help that Tabach soon suffered backlash for the video, and even followed it up with another video apologizing for his poor reporting, and admitting that he was a Chuck E. Cheese fan and that his goal had been to prove Dawson wrong, instead of being impartial.
It’s worth noting that Shane Dawson’s YouTube channel is full of conspiracy theory-related content. One can argue that when you go looking for conspiracies, you’re likely to find them where they don’t exist. It certainly helps the channel earn millions of views.
Many other YouTubers followed up by visiting Chuck E. Cheese and noticing that the slices are different sizes. However, this proved nothing at all related to Dawson’s theory. Perhaps the bigger question is why Chuck E. Cheese hasn’t adjusted to make their slices appear more even, which would probably help to dispel the rumor once and for all.
