Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

About

Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell is a song by Satirical Hip-Hop group Das Racist in which the group repeats the lyric "I'm at the Pizza Hut. I'm at the Taco Bell. I'm at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" over and over. The song's humorous nature inspired image macros and snowclones referencing the song.

Origin

The line first appeared on the Kool AD song "I Zimbra,"^[1] released on November 16th, 2006. According to the band, while performing the song at one of their first shows, the crowd began chanting the line, inspiring the creation of the song.^[3] "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" began circulating online in 2008^[2] and began generating interest over the following two years. In June 2009, the group was interviewed by The Village Voice and talked about the creation of the song, and said:

"The line actually comes from an older song of mine called "I Zimbra," and at one of our first shows, we were doing that song and then just started repeating that line over and over, and people seemed to like it, because people seem to like dumb shit. I know I like dumb shit. We did it in one take on the same mic in our friend's basement like a week later. There are always a number of substances involved."

It was later included on Das Racist's 2010 debut mixtape, Shut Up, Dude.

Spread

The song began becoming a reference in jokes on Tumblr in 2012. On June 19th, bunnytier-blog^[4] posted a joke satirizing the Hey Girls, Did You Know meme by saying ones boobs belong at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in a post that gained over 14,000 notes.

Around the same time, the Steven Universe fandom included references to "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" as part of the Dipper Goes to Taco Bell meme.

Over time, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" became a snowclone on Tumblr and Twitter in which either Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are replaced. Tumblr meme documentation blog memearchives^[5] on August 26th, 2015.

Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell TikTok Trend

Around October 11th, 2020, a trend set to "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" began to spread around AltTikTok. The trend saw members of the LGBTQ+ community (typically those identifying as queer, non-binary, and bi-sexual) dancing one-at-a-time in front of two symbols that best represent their gender identity, followed by a symbol that represents both of them together, as they lip-sync the song (examples shown below). The format is meant to show how each property combines to create something new.

A few days later the trend began to spread outside of AltTikTok and the LGBTQ+ community. The format was expanded to cover combinations and topics outside of the LGBTQ+ community , such as mental health topics and self-deprecating humor based on a user's characteristics and life. One of the earliest examples of the format without an LGBTQ+ theme was uploaded on October 15th by TikToker l_yricc, garnering over 199,000 views in 13 days (shown below, left). On October 17th, TikToker vanyougoghaway uploaded another version of the trend, garnering over 490,000 views in 11 days (shown below, right).

The trend continued to grow over the course of October, also becoming more complex as many TikTokers began representing two contrasting combinations in their videos. For example, on October 19th, TikToker tred_frankels uploaded a version of the trend describing how his mom's straight hair and his dad's curly hair gave him wavy hair, but how his dad's anger issues and mom's submissive nature created problems (shown below, left). The video gained over 2.7 million views in 9 days. Another example was uploaded by AsapSCIENCE on October 23rd, gaining over 3.1 million views in 5 days (shown below, right).

As of October 28th, the original sound for "Combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut" has been used over 59,000 times on TikTok.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References