One of the greatest moments of my working life was when I was a librarian in the Chicago suburbs and, for a live event we put on, I got someone to hit me in the face with a pie.
It got a huge reaction from the audience (and thinking about it, I really should put that at the top of my LinkedIn profile).
But it does bring up an important question: why have comedians been throwing pies at each other for laughs for so long?
The broad answer is that the earliest movies were silent: since they couldn’t have characters tearing each other down with words, they tossed baked goods at each other.
It’s an old technique from the vaudeville days, though it was movies that made the pie in the face gag huge.
They appeared on screen at least as early as 1909, but it was the work of filmmaker Mack Sennett that made them mainstream.
He wrote that he got the idea when actor Mabel Normand got irritated while watching her co-star act out a scene, and she was holding a custard pie at the time, and she decided to throw said pie at his head.
The scene they’d been filming, one that hadn’t really been working up to that point, was suddenly “one of the funniest shots ever flashed on any motion-picture screen.”
Sennett started putting pie gags in all of his pictures, which became huge hits.
Other studios did the same, and suddenly there were so many pies flying around on camera that Hollywood kept several bakeries in business just producing pies for comedic purposes.
In the black and white days blueberry and blackberry pies showed up best.
Later, the Three Stooges and Little Rascals would use shaving cream in pie tins instead of actual pies; they were lighter and easier to throw.
Maybe the peak moment in movie pie throwing was the Laurel & Hardy movie Battle Of The Century.
What starts as a pie fight between the comedy duo and one guy just keeps escalating and escalating until practically the whole town is throwing thousands of pies at each other.
Eventually the pie gag, like so many of my early attempts at actual baking, was overdone.
But what was it about this gag that resonated for so long?
Mack Sennett wrote that part of what made it funny was that it was such a weird and unexpected thing to happen: people don’t throw pies at each other in real life.
But some film thinkers have suggested it’s also a great way to take a pompous somebody-or-other down a peg or two.
If a character were to punch that pompous counterpart in the face, that turns the punchee into a victim.
Not a good look for a protagonist.
But if Moe from the Three Stooges or even Bugs Bunny in Looney Tunes is confronted with some hoity-toity know-it-all or a fussbudget from the upper crust, a pie to the face hurts their dignity and nothing else.
Though I should say, that’s a film explanation, not a legal one. If you hit someone with a pie in real life, and it’s not for a show or for work or something, you’ll probably end up in court.
A decade or so ago Stacey Mei Yan Fong was new to the US and wanted to pay tribute to the country by baking pies.
Her project 50 Pies/50 States put the essence of each state in the Union into pie form, from a Runza pie for Nebraska to a Florida Key lime pie.
The Wisconsin entry was a cranberry pie with fried cheese curds on top!
The messy history of the pie fight, from vaudeville to Nickelodeon (Hopes & Fears via Archive.org)
For the cost of a piece of pie a month you can support our show on Patreon
Image via Wikicommons
