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When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie by Michael Tisserand Joe stumbles into his own surprise party, wearing a sport coat and boxer shorts. “Ma, will you sew a button on for me?” he asks, not yet aware that the room is filled with family and friends. The lights switch on. There is food on the table, bottles of wine on the counters, wide-brimmed hats hanging from nails on the walls. Laughter surrounds the beloved and still pants-less son of Italian immigrants. “Hurry up with the cake,” says Joe’s father, and a skinny younger man in a comically oversized chef’s hat — he’s apparently the only non-Italian here — trips into the room. “Hey, what’s going on here?” asks Joe with a smile, his pants finally on. The skinny friend points to the cake and emits a sort of nasal squeak: “It says, ‘Welcome home, Joe. Amore.’ That means… ” “Love,” says Joe. The friend looks at Joe. “It’s Italian,” he says in that same squeak, “how’d you know?” Replies Joe in a practiced deadpan, “I used to work here.” The scene is from the 1953 Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy The Caddy , with Martin playing Joe Anthony, a tournament golf player, and Lewis playing his friend Harvey Miller, who taught Joe the game but gets brushed aside while Joe pursues fame and romance, until an inevitable final-reel reunion. As with all Martin and Lewis comedies, such a homecoming moment requires a song. Joe — like so many children of immigrants — carries his family’s hopes wherever he goes, and he lets the weight of that burden show for a moment when he’s asked to sing for his own party. The request comes from his mother. “Like old time, you sing a song for mama, si?” she begs, and when Joe protests that he can’t perform in front of so many people, his father looks at him sharply

under raised eyebrows. “You sing-a for mama,” he commands. Joe hits a glass with a breadstick. Right on cue, family members appear at his side with an accordion, guitar and violin. The song that follows will be “That’s Amore,” and it will become an Academy Award-nominated tune and Dean Martin’s first hit recording. Of the many Italian-accented songs to appear on the pop charts in the 1950s — including Louis Prima’s “Buona Sera,” Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” and Domenico Modugno’s “Volare” (later recorded by Martin) — “That’s Amore” will endure the longest, in no small part due to the irresistible, sing-along simile that starts things off: When the moon hits your eye Like a big pizza pie That’s amore In what would be the first of countless performances of this song, Martin croons the lines in The Caddy as if they are an incantation of his family’s culinary joys, each line seemingly inspired by the food being set before him. It begins with the “Amore” in the cake decoration, then

moves onto pizza pie and finishes with pasta e fagioli, or “pasta fazool,” which Martin sings just as Joe’s mother emerges from the kitchen carrying a large bowl of the traditional pasta-and-bean soup. It’s a scene of great sentiment, but as we are in a Martin and Lewis picture, it doesn’t remain sentimental for long. Before Martin croons his final note, Lewis jumps in with an instant parody, singing: If you still kiss your goil After garlic and oil and If you call her your pet Though she’s shaped like spaghet’ This, ultimately, is the story of “That’s Amore,” a song with contradictions baked right into its crust. It is a tale of both ethnic pride and self-ridicule, of sentiment and satire, and of a hit song that its singer didn’t really care for. Along with other Italian pop songs of the decade, “That’s Amore” also helped to fog over wartime images of Benito Mussolini with more benign images of steam rising from pots of pasta and pans of bubbling tomato sauce. Finally, this song of love also contained the seeds of one of the severest breakups

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