How Pie in the Face Became a Comedy Classic, Part 2: The Fall (of the Pie)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Ye

(00:27):
welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. This is part two
of our Pia Escapade. This is part two of our
history are surprisingly long and interesting history of the act
of throwing pie at someone for laughs, specifically, No, I

(00:47):
feel like we should have said that earlier, specifically for laughs. Yeah,
it's it's definitely for laughs. But we also talked about
there's some political undertones behind it, the idea of cutting
down like the upper class, the upper crust. Perhaps it's
okay um down to size visually with a pie in
the face. By the late nineteen twenties, this thing, and

(01:07):
I think I used the term meme status in the
last episode, but it had absolutely overtaken the zeitgeist. It
was something that people recognized, and you know that we
would always talk about ritualization. There's something kind of comforting
and recognizing something and seeing it come back over and
over again, like the old gag of someone getting shot
in the butt and then grabbing the seat of his

(01:28):
pants and jumping up and down. All of these things
to me really remind me of Looney Tunes. I think
that's where I got most of my taste of all
of this type of comedy, because I certainly wasn't like
into like weird archival silent films and you know, Buster
Keaton films and stuff, But Looney Tunes and Bugs Bunny
really took all that and took it to another level,
because you know, you can do more with cartoons than

(01:48):
you can with real bodies that you know, get hurt
and stuff. Yeah, and they are those cartoons, of course,
are heavily based on vaudeville. We want to shout out
our super producer ac pegrum Our, producers Max Williams and
Andrew Howard. I've been Let's get into it. No, let's

(02:11):
go straight to part two of the History of Throwing Pie.
I know, I think I jumped the pie a little
bit there on the beginning. But here we are in
nineteen with Hal Roach Studios and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
You've definitely heard of yes, yeah. At the very end
of part one we tease the most epic of pie

(02:32):
fights on film in Laurel and Hardy's The Battle of
the Century. So now at this point in the late
nineteen twenties, everybody knows about pie fights. It's almost expected,
like it's just it's just one of the ingredients when
you watch a comedy. It was like you were describing
Nol similar to the trope of someone getting shot in

(02:54):
the button then jumping up and down like, Oh, I've
got shot in the butt. But I'm the duke, all right,
you know in there, my trousers are sins. Right. So
when this cliche became so familiar, and this is coming
from that historian Steve Massa we mentioned earlier, there's a
weird psychological thing that happens. The trope starts to recur

(03:18):
more often in the collective mind than it does an
actual film. So we're remembering examples of pie throwing, but
we might be remembering more examples than actually exist. Like
you said, Nol, how Roach Studio gets stand Laurel and
Oliver Hardy together. This is a prescient move. They will

(03:40):
go on to become the most beloved comic duo in
cinema history. They make several films that year, and one
of those is a parody of a boxing match known
as the Battle of the Century. That's right, and and
that was probably one of the big reasons that these
types of pictures were cash hours for the studio because

(04:01):
they were really easy to make, and they just had
kind of like a core cast of players, and compared
to like much larger set piece kind of things or
dramas or period dramas and things like that, you know,
it was really just some props and some costumes and
shooting these kind of sketches. But you're right then, by
this point the pie trope was so ubiquitous that high

(04:22):
level players like Laurel and Hardy who were trying to
like come up with the new next thing, we're almost
kind of like it's kind of been done right there
in the and the producers felt the same way. But
in the writer's room, I guess you could call it.
For that film, The Battle of the Century, there was
a discussion around a particularly physical comedy scene that involved

(04:43):
a banana appeal, like you said, and it's not nearly
as easy to just slip on a banana appeal as
one might think. But in the discussions, some you know,
bright eyed young writer said how about we put in
a pie fight, to which all of the executives and
writers in the room kind of let up collective because
there was it was kind of hackneyed at that point,

(05:04):
but Laurel and Hardy saw potential in kind of subverting
that trope, or at the very least taking it to
such extremes that it could literally never be done again
in any more grand a way as they were going
to end up doing. Yeah, it was brilliant. Laurel attributes
this to himself. He was talking with an author named

(05:26):
as Comedians Are Wanting to Do. He he was talking
with an author named John McCabe, a guy who would
later go on to write Mr. Laurel and Mr Hardy
an affectionate biography, and he said, you know what, exactly
what you're saying, only said, let's give him so many
pies that there will never be room for any more
pie pictures in the whold history of movies. So the

(05:47):
way they have this workout is that Hardy drops a
banana peal and he wants, you know, he attends for
Laurel to slip on this in front of a place
called an a burst of creativity, Ye old pie shop,
but like coppy like spelled like the old English way
s h O P pe yes an old O L
d E. So there's a pie delivery guy he walks by,

(06:09):
he slips on the peel. He's p oed, so he
throws a pie at Hearty's face hard. He gets mad.
He throws a pie in retaliation, and instead of hitting
the pie delivery guy, he hits a young woman on
her bottom. She turns and then she gets another pie
directly in the face, and then she stomps over and
matters escalate from there. They really do to absolutely over

(06:33):
the top proportions. I think there's an estimate, you know,
and it's probably again it's one of these Hollywood lore
things that they used four thousand pies, the entire output
of a local Los Angeles I think it was literally
called the Los Angeles Pie Company, their entire I think
it was day's output or was it a week's output.
I'm not going to sure. How many pies can you
make in a day? Yeah, the whole day at least.

(06:55):
But like, if you're familiar with the wonderful for edicch
crescendo of classical work like The Hall of the Mountain King,
this is basically a slapstick version of that dun dunt
dunt on to because soon as soon as the young
lady gets involved, pies are going everywhere. There's a by

(07:16):
standards get involved. There's a guy in a top at
he gets hit. There's a patient in a dentist's chair,
they get smacked. There's a guy who's working in the sewer.
He peeps up from a manhole. Smack. There's a person
at a lunch counter smack. There's a guy who just
got a haircut. He's admiring himself. Smack. There's some lady
mining her own business, tending flowers. Smack, smack, smack. At

(07:36):
one point, Laurel is inside of the pie delivery guy's
truck and he's filling orders for people who are buying
pies to throw at other people. It's amazing. It's an
amazing melee. It also reminds me of that I Love
Lucy sketch, where they're she and Ethel are working at
the chocolate factory and they're like putting the chocolates into
these little tins or whatever they are as the assembly

(07:58):
line goes by, and then July they increase the speed
of the assembly line until they're like trying to keep
up their shoving chocolates in their mouths and down their
you know, dresses and stuff. It's that kind of your
right and that escalating frenetic pace and tension that just
leaves you kind of like with your jaw dropped, you know. Yeah.
And even the literary crowd got on board with this,

(08:20):
the famous writer Henry Miller, Yes, very steamy writer. Yes yeah, yeah,
he was known as a perennial bohemian, so everybody have
fun with Google on that one. But so he describes
this a bit with a bit of hyperbole. I think,
as quote, the greatest comic film ever made because it

(08:40):
bought pie throwing to apotheosis. There was nothing but pie
throwing in it, nothing but pies, thousands and thousands of pies,
and everybody throwing them left and right. Oh. I can
see how that could appeal to a bohemian are kind
of a hedonistic type dude like Henry Miller, you know. Um.
And then this film critic, this top film critic of
the of the Age from nineteen forty nine, James A.

(09:03):
G commented, thus Lee for Life magazine, And this is great.
This is like such a poetic description of what's ultimately
an absurd thing. The first pies were thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophically,
then innocent bystanders began to get caught into the vortex
a full pitch. It was armageddon, but everything was calculated
so nicely that until late in the picture when Havoc

(09:24):
took over, every pie made its special kind of point
and then piled on its special kind of laughter. Wow.
Just like it also reminds me of like again, this
is such a trope, and a trope within a trope.
At this point, that's scene in Wayne's World where I mean,

(09:44):
I think it's Wayne's World two where he's on the
way to the wedding chapel to keep Christopher Walking from
marrying Cassandra, and there's like the two dudes with the
glass that are walking across the street and there's like
chicken coops or something, you know what I mean, one
of those scenes where everything that can go wrong does
in this Rube Goldberg chain reaction. It's very expertly choreographed

(10:05):
to you know, the if you look at the film, um,
it really is a thing to behold, and four thousand pies,
there's nothing to sneeze at. And like we talked about
earlier in the previous episode, doing one of these sequences
to get it wrong requires so much resetting, you know it,
Literally everyone would have to change costumes and shower off.
You can't get this wrong. It's like the scene where

(10:26):
you blow up the entire town. You get it's gonna
be an absolute disaster if you have to do it again. Yeah,
especially because you want to go with practical effects. A
c g I pie just won't cut it. And it's
weird because the world of comedy for a time reacted
against the pie troupe. By the time the nineteen twenties
come around, by the time Laura and Harder are doing

(10:48):
this brilliant work, the public is tired of the custard
pie bit. There were even comedies coming out that we're
advertising the fact that they did not have a pie
throwing scene, and like ads were so snarky back then.
They would say things like a custard pie and pretty
girl too in a bathing suit do not make a comedy. Yeah,

(11:09):
this would have absolutely become like the broadest comedy of
the time, like the way we would think of like
maybe gross out comedy today, like the Fairly Brothers movies.
There no not not to diss the Fairly Brothers movies.
Some of those are quite funny, but there are things
that are considered low, you know, like in terms of
critical circles. And obviously the Laurel and Hardy bit was

(11:30):
high minded enough and absolutely genre busting that even the
literati we're getting in on it and saying this is
kind of cool. But that really was the high water
mark for pie throwing, right and then after that it
kind of became ghost to do it. And of course

(11:51):
we're mentioning pies. A lot of our fellow listeners in
the audience today may have wondered why we didn't mention
one of the infamous trios Triumvit of comedy, a Trinity
of slapstick, the Three Stooges. Between nineteen thirty and nineteen sixty,
they made like two hundred and twenty films, and they
loved a pie gag, That's the thing. Then the whole

(12:12):
position I was talking about earlier, I think was more
like the critical perspective that this was, you know, sort
of like old hat or old pie or whatever. But
that doesn't mean that the public didn't still kind of
love it, and there was what you could maybe call
a pie resurgence. Did it ever really leave? I don't know.
The Three Stooges were kind of at the core of that,
with those two hundred and twenty films, many of which
were like pie films in the the it even had

(12:35):
the word pie in the title films like in the
Sweet Pie and Pie Yeah in one and Pies and
Guys in nineteen fifty eight. And they even remade movies
that had pie in the title, right. Yeah. So there
was a nineteen five remake of Max Sinnett's The Great

(12:56):
Pie Mystery. They just changed the title to Spook louder So.
In this film, there's a segment where Larry, Moe and
Curly are trying to control this weird machine that appears
to throw pies out of thin air. And uh, it's
not you know, it's not maybe the best work and though,
but it's useful for our episode today. Well, they're catching

(13:17):
up with the times right now, robots are throwing pies.
This is like the brave new world of pie throwing.
They have to like take it to the next level,
right And Larry Fine would later recall that there was
some blood, sweat and tears involved in the pie business.
He said, sometimes we would run out of pies, so
the prop man would sweep up the pie goop off

(13:37):
the floor, complete with nails, splinters and tax and he said,
you know, he still had what I'm just gonna arbitrarily
called the Arbuckle problem from now on, which is you
had to get people to convincingly appear as though they
did not know a pie was coming your way. And
so he talks about how they would fake each other

(13:58):
out with this, the same way that maybe a nurse
might fake out a kid who's getting a shot. They
would say, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna count to three
and then we're gonna throw it. But then you'd lean
to the person throwing it and they would be like, okay,
throw onto diabolical Yeah, and then no, you're absolutely right then.
But it was really important to get that absolutely authentic reaction,

(14:20):
otherwise the comedy wouldn't land, you know. Yeah. And so
now we've got the stooges Laurel and Hardy. They're big, big, big,
and the pie throwing game, and a bunch of other
people are copying them. Children's shows like The Little Rascals.
They love a good pie throwing scene. Also to the
earlier point, Bugs Bunny being very much descended from vaudeville,

(14:42):
it's also throwing pies. And then you see you see
an attempt to get towards more of that Hall of
the Mountain King pie throwing madness. In a Little Rascal
short nineteen thirty called Shivering Shakespeare, the kids are doing
a play and then things ultimately to center into a
bunch of adults throwing desserts and pies at kids and

(15:04):
vice versa. That's right, Ben, And like we talked about earlier,
cartoons really started getting into the mix, because, as we know,
there was a time where cartoons would you know, proceed
like the feature or whatever. I mean that even happened,
Like I remember a cartoon preceding Who Framed Roger Rabbit
and a couple of other like Warner Brothers features that
when I was a kid, there would be a cartoon

(15:26):
before it. And obviously Pixar has kind of like you know,
continued that tradition with all their Pixar shorts. But the
Looney Tunes really kind of we're mimicking so many of
these tropes that were so big in Hollywood and kind
of like you know, making it even more absurd. And
when you go back and watch some of the old
Liney Tunes cartoons, you can really see the different styles

(15:47):
of pie and represented like in Slick Hair, the Liney
Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny is, you know, torturing Elmer
Fudd as usual. They're working in some kind of bakery
and he's tricking him into baking pies, only that hit
him in the face with every single pie that he
finishes making. And in that clip, Humphrey Bogart makes an appearance,
of course, but those pies are custard. They're like dripping

(16:09):
off of their faces with this kind of beige liquid.
But there's also Bugs Bunny cartoons where you see another
version of the pie that for like contrast reasons and
you know, costume coloration reasons, they used blackberries. And when
you see like the kind of heavier crusted pies dripping off,
there's like different versions of it in all these Liney
Tunes cartoons. I think that's such a cool mimicking of
kind of the history of this. Yeah, and they're also

(16:32):
something smart. They're mimicking the dependence upon pie throwing that
earlier comedic minds did seem to have during that era
proceeding the rise of Looney Tunes. But it doesn't in there.
If we jump forward to the sixties and seventies, we
see the same kind of commentary happening again. In mel
Brooks Blazing Saddles four, there is a pie fight, but

(16:57):
it's also satire, make in fun of Hollywood's reliance on
the idea of the pie fight. So it became this
sort of visual metaphor for unoriginal comedy exactly. Yeah, even Chaplain,
you know, way back because he always kind of had
his like finger on the pulse of what was going

(17:18):
on in Hollywood and kind of trying to upend it
and you know, sort of subvert a lot of these tropes,
like right when they were happening, finger in the pie
maybe a million percent um. And back in nineteen sixteen
in a film that we mentioned in the previous episode
behind the Screen, it is behind the scenes in a
made up film studio showing this kind of like absurd

(17:39):
dependence where like it's almost like a factory where large
groups of actors are like lined up practicing their pie
throwing skills because it was such an important thing that
you had to like have special training, like some sort
of Navy seals operation and the interstitial in what was
a silent film, you know the ones where like they
have the action and then some lines come on, says

(18:01):
the comedy department rehearsing a new idea. And the idea
in nineteen sixteen that it was a new idea was
in and of itself like kind of mocking the whole practice, right,
And now the pie fight itself doesn't just seem to
be waning in popularity. Even the idea of making fun
of pie throwing seems to have gotten a little bit old,
but it hasn't disappeared. You'll always see a shout out

(18:23):
popping up in the oddest places. We mentioned children's TV
and part one of the series. But you know, I
think a good pie to the face is never gonna
quite go away, just because it's so easy, and now
it's inherently its own kind of commentary. And not only
will pie fighting probably never go away completely, but you

(18:47):
can also see it in some very high minded films,
perhaps most infamously in nineteen sixty four's Doctor Strange Love
by Stanley kober Yeah. Well, you might not be able

(19:08):
to see it in the actual cut of Stanley Kubrick's
Doctor Strangelove. Maybe there's a version where you can get
This deleted scene might be a little too early. It
might have just been lost to time. But there apparently
was a scene shot between the generals and the politicians
in the war room. Because it's one of my favorite movies.
I love Dr Strangelove so much, where they got into

(19:28):
like a massive pie fight. I'm kind of glad they
cut it. It seems like that would have been a
little over the top. It's it's kind of subtle the
way it is as extreme and bizarre as it gets.
But that's so funny to know that that happened. Yeah.
The thing is that the reason Kubrick decided to cut
this scene is because he felt the actors playing the

(19:49):
generals were having too much fun. Their jubilation, he said,
felt inappropriate. And there's another political reason didn't make it
in there. In this scene, Peter Sellers plays President Monthly,
and the President Monthly is hit with a pie in
the face as a general yells out quote, our gallant

(20:09):
young president has been struck down in his prime. This
scene was shot before the assassination of President JFK in
November of nineteen sixty three, but the film wasn't released
until afterwards, so they felt like it would have been
a bad look to keep it in. Yeah, it's sort
of the past equivalent of like removing shots of the
World Trade Center, for example, in films that were you know,

(20:32):
in production before that event happened, and even for many
years after. Uh, those shots were removed, even from like
the openings of long running television shows. Yep. And if
you want to see the Laurel and Hardy epic pie
fight that is now acknowledged as the pie fight to
end all pie fights, you are in luck because for

(20:54):
a long, long time this battle was lost to history.
For decade, half of the short was missing. It was
twenty minutes on two reels, and that second reel had
been lost. So film historians have been trying to put
in the gaps of the Battle of the Century with
exploratory title cards, but these could never really replicate the

(21:18):
work the actors have been doing. And so it wasn't
until twenty fifteen when a toxicologist named John Mer salas
toxicologist by day, that's his part Kent stuff. He's a
he's a film collector and scholar. That's his superman at night.
He's like a film scholar like Dexter, almost you know,

(21:38):
like by day he's like working for the man, you know,
like trying to right wrongs and solve crimes, and by
nine he's doing this completely other thing, a little different.
But that's so great that he is the one who
kind of cracked the case on this, right. Yeah, and
he didn't realize what he had at first. He mentioned
it at a film conference in Virginia. He put the

(21:59):
real into his projector and he's played the film. And
then as he looked at Laurel and Hardy walking down
the street and has reported that New York Times article
you mentioned earlier, he noticed he was seeing something he
had never seen before. He saw the lead into the
Pie Fight. He had seen the Banana Seller. And then

(22:19):
right after that he started making plans to restore and
reunite both reels. And so that is why now you
can watch the Pie Fight as it was intended, thank god. Yeah,
the article in the New York Times comedy Sweet Weapon
the Cream Pie was from and that was when kind
of efforts to restore this were underway. You can at

(22:40):
the very least watch this on YouTube, and I would
hope that it exists in some kind of you know,
restored like four K version. This seems like the kind
of thing you should see in four K, but you
can't find it on YouTube. If you just searched for
Laurel and Hardy Battle of the Century, it's like three
minutes forty seconds. If you're for by the People is
like me, You can also receivably recreate your own pie fight.

(23:03):
Just have that that. How about that as a mass
post pandemic party, you just sign up where we get
We'll we'll rent out a park, We'll get like a
hundred something people in thousands of pies. Ah, I mean
this needs to happen. Then this needs to be a
yearly thing. I think we should bring it back. But
let's not. And without talking about something that we alluded

(23:24):
to earlier but didn't really follow through with Buster Keaton,
we talked about how he was kind of like the
brain behind the sort of elevation of the pie hit
as an art form, and as it became so much
more popular and then kind of waned in popularity, it
became really important to use it for much less slapsticky

(23:45):
and much more kind of cultural reasons. Right, So there
became this language of who was okay to hit with
a pie? And who was not who was fair game? Yeah,
this is the this is the matter of pie ethics
a heast the very end of episode one. Yes, not
only was this a preemptive two parter, but we also
followed through what they're going to do. So Keaton is

(24:10):
in this interview with a storian and broadcaster named Studs Turkle,
which is an awesome name. That's nineteen sixty two, and
Keaton says, you know, you could hit the wrong people
with a pie and getting an audience mad at you.
There are certain characters you just don't hit with a pie.
We found that out a long time ago. There are

(24:30):
just certain people you do not hit with a pie.
That's all there is to it. And he provided an
example of this, didn't he. Yeah, and this is in
the sixties. This guy is kind of like, you know,
in his twilight years, and he still talks like a
cartoon character. I wish we had tape of this, but
we should. I want to put it in like a
weird mid Atlantic, you know, early film accent. But I'm

(24:53):
just gonna read it because the words say enough on
their own. If I had a grand dame who was
dogging it and putting it on a gray haired woman
but so overbearing and everything else that the audience would
like to hit her. Then you could hit her with
a pie and they laugh their heads off. But if
she was a legitimate old lady and a sincere character,
you wouldn't dare hit her. If she's a phony, that's different.

(25:16):
The same thing goes for a man. It's the same
thing with any character where you have to, you know,
empathize with the character, and if you don't, it's sort
of like a minor villain. Right, this gray haired old
woman who's overbearing and Keaton's mind is a minor villain
who deserves some sort of retribution in the form of
a pie in the face. And of course there are

(25:37):
real incidents of actual people, often prominent politicians, thought leaders,
being hit with pies. One of them was Bill Gates
get hit the pie by a pie thrower named Noel Goden,
writer and uh and god And targeted Bill Gates for
this pie because he thought the guy was getting quote

(25:59):
too haughty and so so there was a meeting between
like the there's a meeting Brussels, Bill Gates, the Flemish
minister and the president at the time and go to
and step forward through cream pies at Bill Gates face,
and then he just said, my work is finished here
and Bill Gates, Old Billy g responds and like a

(26:23):
pretty strange and and somewhat impressive way. The reports say
that Gates was initially really startled, but then he tried
to react casually. A little bit later he got cleaned up,
and then he said, you know, I was just surprised
because the pie wasn't all that good. Yeah. Well, as
we everything we know about pie throwing says that, you know,
maximum impact in a pie throw, it is not necessarily

(26:44):
a delicious pie. Equal God, I'm surprised that the guy
that did this didn't get like sniped by somebody up
in a in a tree or a turret somewhere. I
mean Bill Gates. That guys like a government into himself.
That's right. This was I believe when he threw the pie.
So maybe it was a slightly different time. But shout

(27:04):
out to you pie throwers of the world. There's no
one who should be considered above it, but there are
some people who deserve dignity. We hope that we have
alongside a slice of comedy history, we hope we have
also given you a little Ala Mode of pie Ethics. Yum.
You can find us on the internet. We are Ridiculous

(27:25):
History on all the places you find podcasts on the internet.
You can also find Ben and I as individual human persons.
I am at how now Noel Brown on Instagram. Throw
a digital pie my way over on Twitter where I'm
at Ben Boland hs W or you know, toss me
some of your favorite bits of comedy history over at
Instagram where I'm at Ben Boland. That's bow l I

(27:47):
n big big pie in the face, well deserved to
our friend slash nemesis Jonathan Strickland a k. The Quister
huge thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. He
doesn't get a pie unless he, you know, is in
the mood for a pie. Christopher A sciotis here in
spirit our research associate extraordinary Gabe Luizier. You know I
would throw I could see Christopher because he plays such

(28:10):
an excellent straight man. I could see him being a
pie victim in fiction, but I don't know a very
dead pan reaction right exactly. Yes, I can visualize it now.
Thanks also, of course, through super producer Casey Pegram our
producers Andrew Howard and Max Williams and Noel. Thanks to you, man,
Thanks thanks for not sabotaging with a pie low these

(28:33):
many years. It's it's gonna be very difficult to do
it through the zoom, Ben, But maybe I could rig
up some elaborate device that would secret I could spirit
into your home that on the push of a giant
red button would slap you in the face with a pie.
Or has somebody done this already a delivery service. That's
like the old singing telegrams back in the day where

(28:53):
someone opens up the door and you just say, you know,
like you just say like kind regards from Ben and Noel.
They throw a pie at you when they run away.
That that would be a dangerous job. That's basically assault.
That's a non consensual pie. Then we talked about this.
You have you have to have you have to have
consent for for the pie in the face. Man, this

(29:13):
was a fun one. We'll see you next time, folks.
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