Paul F. Tompkins has a theory about why cake wins the dessert debate, and it's almost embarrassingly simple: frosting exists.
In a bit from the Just for Laughs comedy festival, Tompkins makes his case with the kind of passionate logic that only works when you're talking about baked goods. Frosting, he argues, is the decisive factor. Whipped cream on pie? He's not having it. "Don't make me laugh," he says. "You've embarrassed the both of us with that answer."
His real frustration is with pie filling itself. It sounds underwhelming because it is underwhelming—it's just there to hold the crust together, doing the minimum required work. Cake, by contrast, has frosting doing the heavy lifting, making every bite intentional and layered. The only way pie could win, Tompkins reckons, is if "science gets off its ass" and figures out how to frost a pie without everything falling apart.
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Start Your News DetoxWhat makes the bit land is that Tompkins isn't actually trying to settle anything. He acknowledges that declaring one dessert superior to another is "absurd." The whole thing is a setup for people to argue back, which they do—some defending American pie's place in the pantheon, others insisting a good cake is genuinely unbeatable. It's the kind of argument that's pointless and perfect at the same time, the exact tone you want when discussing something that ultimately doesn't matter but somehow feels important.
The real takeaway isn't that cake is objectively better. It's that Tompkins found a way to make people care deeply about a dessert debate by focusing on one detail—frosting—and refusing to let it go. In a world of complicated food discourse, sometimes the simplest observation wins.
