Yogi Berra, Pizza, and Infinite Love

Also some cameos from Mitch Hedberg, Mark Twain, and more!

Mar 13, 2025

Dear friends,

Thank you for being here!
I’m grateful that you are who and where you are.
And now, the latest entry in my project wherein I examine a piece of comedy that I love that’s stayed with me ever since I heard it.

The project began with a piece about a Mitch Hedberg joke, and today’s inspirational gem comes from Yogi Berra, who I first leaned about as a child. I don’t remember when or how; it seems that I have always known him. I know that he played baseball but MAINLY I know him for his Yogi-isms.

Some classic examples:

"It ain't over 'til it's over."
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
"The future ain't what it used to be."
"A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."
"Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours."
"I really didn't say everything I said."

The one I’d like to focus on today is THIS one:

”When the waitress asked if I wanted my pizza cut into four or eight slices, I said, 'Four. I don't think I can eat eight.“

As a kid, I thought this man was silly.
As an adult, I am a silly man.
I value silliness, and the wisdom that can often accompany it.

The pizza line PARTICULARLY tickles me, because I remember thinking initially "what a fool, doesn't he know that it's the same amount of pizza regardless of how many slices it's cut into?"

And while that assessment is still MATHEMATICALLY accurate, I feel as though there's a PSYCHOLOGICAL reality to what he's expressing.

Eating four slices of pizza SOUNDS much more reasonable than eating eight slices of pizza.

A brief story about my life:
When I was a teenager, I would sometimes order a whole pizza for myself, and it would be delivered having been cut into eight slices.

A less brief interlude before the story continues:
I actually have never experienced being asked how many slices I'd like a pizza cut into, and I wonder how different my life would be if I had.

Now I'm imagining my life both of these ways.
Way One: thinking about wholes potentially divided multiple ways.
Way Two: not thinking like that.

And with that thought, I have divided my life into two ways.
Way One: thinking about my life potentially divided into multiple ways.
Way Two: not thinking like that.

Way Two is currently impossible for me. But that's good news, because with Way One, I feel like I get to live BOTH ways. It seems that Way One somehow CONTAINS both Way One and Way Two.

Perhaps in a similar way to how the day contains both night and day.
(A day is 24 hours, 8 of which are night, and the other 16 of which are... day?)
So, the way contains the way and the way. This way and that way.
What was I talking about?
Pizza!

Back to our story:
So there I was, having been delivered eight slices of pizza.

I would immediately eat four of them, quickly.
And those four slices might have sated me, and likely would have if I waited, but I was a foolhardy adventurer in foodland, and it always tasted so good that I would want just one more slice, so I would eat a fifth, leaving behind only three. A measly three.

By this point, I was getting pretty full, so I would entertain the idea of saving the final three slices for a later date. But that idea was not the MOST entertaining of the ideas I would have.

The winner of that entertaining-idea competition would usually be "Three slices of pizza? That's hardly a meal. You'll be sad to only eat three slices tomorrow, so might as well just finish them up now," and I would.

Thus, I did what Yogi Berra thought was impossible: eat eight slices of pizza! (When it probably would have made me feel better if I had only eaten four.)

It might have been wiser to learn from Berra's wisdom sooner, not in what he was saying but in the fact that he was actually thinking about how much he could and couldn't eat! As a child, I don't think I'd ever thought "I don't think I could eat..." anything!

And how would I have felt if the same-sized pizza were sliced differently?
Sometimes, a pizza comes sliced into the tiniest slices, little baby slices, and it's like "wow, I could eat SO MANY of these."

When looking at tiny slices, I don't think "I can't eat all of this."
But what if the server had said, before I had ever looked at the pizza, "Would you like to have 32 slices of pizza?"
Then I might very well think that I couldn't, just like Berra before me.

It's been said, "Think you can or think you can't, either way you'll be right" with my new addition "But one of the ways might make your stomach hurt more from being too full."

Another interlude:
I'm reminded of this wonderful Mitch Hedberg classic (and this week's dispatch wasn't even going to be ABOUT Mitch!):

"Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something."
-- Mitch Hedberg

Mitch, to me, has carried on the mantle of Yogi Berra.
This specific Mitch-ism addresses the other side of Yogi's pizza equation.
Yogi doesn't think he could eat eight.
Mitch suggests there could be a time we might want to eat two thousand of something.

Two-thousand of what? Eight of what?
The numbers aren't the only important thing.
Quantity isn't all that matters, even though "Quantity" has a larger quantity of letters than its pal Quality.
(Does Quality have a higher quality of letters?)

For example, the words "million" and "billion" are so similar, and the numbers themselves SEEM so similar (they both mean to me something like "ridiculously high numbers that I can't really conceive of"), but do you know the difference between them? I've heard it put this way: a million seconds is about 11.5 days, whereas a billion seconds is about 32 YEARS.

Which brings me to my main point: infinite love.

Love is more difficult to quantify than grains of rice or slices of pizza.
How much love do you have, do you feel, do you give, do you receive?
How much love do you offer to yourself, to others?
To your loved ones, to people who aren't your loved ones?

A Buddhist definition of love that I really, well, love:
Loving someone means that you wish for their happiness to increase.
By that definition, I love everyone.

Some people slice up love with different definitions, and I understand these definitions as well.

I love my parents differently than I love people who aren't my parents.
I love my girlfriend differently than I love people who aren't my girlfriend.
I love my best friends differently than I love people who aren't my best friends.
I love each individual in my life differently than I love every other individual.
I love each individual NOT in my life differently than I love every other individual.

If existence is a restaurant, and someone asked me before I was born, "How do you want your loving experience to be sliced? A few loved ones? Billions of loved ones? Somewhere in between?" I think that would be a difficult question to answer.

But the good news is, I think that the infinite pizza of love that is the universe can be sliced any way, and the infinite love remains the same.

And here I am now, cramming more and more ideas into this piece, the same way I crammed more and more pizza slices into my young face, when it might have been wiser and felt better to stop sooner. And yet, I almost can't stop, because I keep thinking about other people and ideas that I love that seem relevant that I want to share. There are probably somewhere between 2000 and a billion, but I'll take a long page out of Mark Twain's many books and just share one more for now:

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
-- Mark Twain

I hope this page isn't too crowded with words and ideas such that nobody goes here anymore.

A nickel might not be worth a dime anymore, but I hope I've provided closer to a billion dollars worth of ideas in nickels than a million in dimes.
(And I'd split that into more than eight slices, for sharing. That's something that I never thought of until now, regarding that original Yogi pizza line... why not have it split into eight, only eat the four that you can, and then share the rest with a friend? And you can even keep splitting those slices in half and in half and in half until there's enough to share with everyone in the universe, which I call Zeno's Pizza Paradox. OK, that's enough ideas for now!)

And Yogi may not have said everything that he said, but he was right about this:
"It ain't over 'til it's over."

And when will it be over?
We'll know in the future, even though it ain't what it used to be.

In conclusion, let's agree to all go to each other's funerals.
I love you.

And it ain’t over yet!
Now, because I like to share MY jokes as well, here are some of my jokes that I share with you. Because Yogi played ball, let’s have a ball with that concept!

A) is for An oddball:

we all know that an oddball is odd.
but you know what’s even odder than an oddball?
an EVENball!

B) is for having a Ball:

i bet that “having a ball” was named by a dog.
because
who loves having a ball more than a dog?

C) is for Candles:

the tv show “friday night lights”
sounds much more like it’s about shabbat candles
than about football.

Share Arty Har-Hars

And it STILL ain’t over! Now, for some questions for YOU!
(Feel free to comment or hit reply to this email with any responses.
I’d love to hear from you.)

1) How are you doing? How are you feeling? What is new and good?
2) Do you have a favorite Yogi-ism? One I shared? One I didn’t?
3) Are there other Yogi Berra-like figures in your life?
4) Who is someone that you love?
5) How are you doing NOW?

Arty Har-Hars

Yogi Berra, Pizza, and Infinite Love

Also some cameos from Mitch Hedberg, Mark Twain, and more!

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