Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Ye
Speaker 1: welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
Speaker 1: always so much for tuning in. This is part two
Speaker 1: of our Pia Escapade. This is part two of our
Speaker 1: history are surprisingly long and interesting history of the act
Speaker 1: of throwing pie at someone for laughs, specifically, No, I
Speaker 1: feel like we should have said that earlier, specifically for laughs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's definitely for laughs. But we also talked about
Speaker 1: there's some political undertones behind it, the idea of cutting
Speaker 1: down like the upper class, the upper crust. Perhaps it's
Speaker 1: okay um down to size visually with a pie in
Speaker 1: the face. By the late nineteen twenties, this thing, and
Speaker 1: I think I used the term meme status in the
Speaker 1: last episode, but it had absolutely overtaken the zeitgeist. It
Speaker 1: was something that people recognized, and you know that we
Speaker 1: would always talk about ritualization. There's something kind of comforting
Speaker 1: and recognizing something and seeing it come back over and
Speaker 1: over again, like the old gag of someone getting shot
Speaker 1: in the butt and then grabbing the seat of his
Speaker 1: pants and jumping up and down. All of these things
Speaker 1: to me really remind me of Looney Tunes. I think
Speaker 1: that's where I got most of my taste of all
Speaker 1: of this type of comedy, because I certainly wasn't like
Speaker 1: into like weird archival silent films and you know, Buster
Speaker 1: Keaton films and stuff, But Looney Tunes and Bugs Bunny
Speaker 1: really took all that and took it to another level,
Speaker 1: because you know, you can do more with cartoons than
Speaker 1: you can with real bodies that you know, get hurt
Speaker 1: and stuff. Yeah, and they are those cartoons, of course,
Speaker 1: are heavily based on vaudeville. We want to shout out
Speaker 1: our super producer ac pegrum Our, producers Max Williams and
Speaker 1: Andrew Howard. I've been Let's get into it. No, let's
Speaker 1: go straight to part two of the History of Throwing Pie.
Speaker 1: I know, I think I jumped the pie a little
Speaker 1: bit there on the beginning. But here we are in
Speaker 1: nineteen with Hal Roach Studios and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Speaker 1: You've definitely heard of yes, yeah. At the very end
Speaker 1: of part one we tease the most epic of pie
Speaker 1: fights on film in Laurel and Hardy's The Battle of
Speaker 1: the Century. So now at this point in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, everybody knows about pie fights. It's almost expected,
Speaker 1: like it's just it's just one of the ingredients when
Speaker 1: you watch a comedy. It was like you were describing
Speaker 1: Nol similar to the trope of someone getting shot in
Speaker 1: the button then jumping up and down like, Oh, I've
Speaker 1: got shot in the butt. But I'm the duke, all right,
Speaker 1: you know in there, my trousers are sins. Right. So
Speaker 1: when this cliche became so familiar, and this is coming
Speaker 1: from that historian Steve Massa we mentioned earlier, there's a
Speaker 1: weird psychological thing that happens. The trope starts to recur
Speaker 1: more often in the collective mind than it does an
Speaker 1: actual film. So we're remembering examples of pie throwing, but
Speaker 1: we might be remembering more examples than actually exist. Like
Speaker 1: you said, Nol, how Roach Studio gets stand Laurel and
Speaker 1: Oliver Hardy together. This is a prescient move. They will
Speaker 1: go on to become the most beloved comic duo in
Speaker 1: cinema history. They make several films that year, and one
Speaker 1: of those is a parody of a boxing match known
Speaker 1: as the Battle of the Century. That's right, and and
Speaker 1: that was probably one of the big reasons that these
Speaker 1: types of pictures were cash hours for the studio because
Speaker 1: they were really easy to make, and they just had
Speaker 1: kind of like a core cast of players, and compared
Speaker 1: to like much larger set piece kind of things or
Speaker 1: dramas or period dramas and things like that, you know,
Speaker 1: it was really just some props and some costumes and
Speaker 1: shooting these kind of sketches. But you're right then, by
Speaker 1: this point the pie trope was so ubiquitous that high
Speaker 1: level players like Laurel and Hardy who were trying to
Speaker 1: like come up with the new next thing, we're almost
Speaker 1: kind of like it's kind of been done right there
Speaker 1: in the and the producers felt the same way. But
Speaker 1: in the writer's room, I guess you could call it.
Speaker 1: For that film, The Battle of the Century, there was
Speaker 1: a discussion around a particularly physical comedy scene that involved
Speaker 1: a banana appeal, like you said, and it's not nearly
Speaker 1: as easy to just slip on a banana appeal as
Speaker 1: one might think. But in the discussions, some you know,
Speaker 1: bright eyed young writer said how about we put in
Speaker 1: a pie fight, to which all of the executives and
Speaker 1: writers in the room kind of let up collective because
Speaker 1: there was it was kind of hackneyed at that point,
Speaker 1: but Laurel and Hardy saw potential in kind of subverting
Speaker 1: that trope, or at the very least taking it to
Speaker 1: such extremes that it could literally never be done again
Speaker 1: in any more grand a way as they were going
Speaker 1: to end up doing. Yeah, it was brilliant. Laurel attributes
Speaker 1: this to himself. He was talking with an author named
Speaker 1: as Comedians Are Wanting to Do. He he was talking
Speaker 1: with an author named John McCabe, a guy who would
Speaker 1: later go on to write Mr. Laurel and Mr Hardy
Speaker 1: an affectionate biography, and he said, you know what, exactly
Speaker 1: what you're saying, only said, let's give him so many
Speaker 1: pies that there will never be room for any more
Speaker 1: pie pictures in the whold history of movies. So the
Speaker 1: way they have this workout is that Hardy drops a
Speaker 1: banana peal and he wants, you know, he attends for
Speaker 1: Laurel to slip on this in front of a place
Speaker 1: called an a burst of creativity, Ye old pie shop,
Speaker 1: but like coppy like spelled like the old English way
Speaker 1: s h O P pe yes an old O L
Speaker 1: d E. So there's a pie delivery guy he walks by,
Speaker 1: he slips on the peel. He's p oed, so he
Speaker 1: throws a pie at Hearty's face hard. He gets mad.
Speaker 1: He throws a pie in retaliation, and instead of hitting
Speaker 1: the pie delivery guy, he hits a young woman on
Speaker 1: her bottom. She turns and then she gets another pie
Speaker 1: directly in the face, and then she stomps over and
Speaker 1: matters escalate from there. They really do to absolutely over
Speaker 1: the top proportions. I think there's an estimate, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's probably again it's one of these Hollywood lore
Speaker 1: things that they used four thousand pies, the entire output
Speaker 1: of a local Los Angeles I think it was literally
Speaker 1: called the Los Angeles Pie Company, their entire I think
Speaker 1: it was day's output or was it a week's output.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to sure. How many pies can you
Speaker 1: make in a day? Yeah, the whole day at least.
Speaker 1: But like, if you're familiar with the wonderful for edicch
Speaker 1: crescendo of classical work like The Hall of the Mountain King,
Speaker 1: this is basically a slapstick version of that dun dunt
Speaker 1: dunt on to because soon as soon as the young
Speaker 1: lady gets involved, pies are going everywhere. There's a by
Speaker 1: standards get involved. There's a guy in a top at
Speaker 1: he gets hit. There's a patient in a dentist's chair,
Speaker 1: they get smacked. There's a guy who's working in the sewer.
Speaker 1: He peeps up from a manhole. Smack. There's a person
Speaker 1: at a lunch counter smack. There's a guy who just
Speaker 1: got a haircut. He's admiring himself. Smack. There's some lady
Speaker 1: mining her own business, tending flowers. Smack, smack, smack. At
Speaker 1: one point, Laurel is inside of the pie delivery guy's
Speaker 1: truck and he's filling orders for people who are buying
Speaker 1: pies to throw at other people. It's amazing. It's an
Speaker 1: amazing melee. It also reminds me of that I Love
Speaker 1: Lucy sketch, where they're she and Ethel are working at
Speaker 1: the chocolate factory and they're like putting the chocolates into
Speaker 1: these little tins or whatever they are as the assembly
Speaker 1: line goes by, and then July they increase the speed
Speaker 1: of the assembly line until they're like trying to keep
Speaker 1: up their shoving chocolates in their mouths and down their
Speaker 1: you know, dresses and stuff. It's that kind of your
Speaker 1: right and that escalating frenetic pace and tension that just
Speaker 1: leaves you kind of like with your jaw dropped, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And even the literary crowd got on board with this,
Speaker 1: the famous writer Henry Miller, Yes, very steamy writer. Yes yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was known as a perennial bohemian, so everybody have
Speaker 1: fun with Google on that one. But so he describes
Speaker 1: this a bit with a bit of hyperbole. I think,
Speaker 1: as quote, the greatest comic film ever made because it
Speaker 1: bought pie throwing to apotheosis. There was nothing but pie
Speaker 1: throwing in it, nothing but pies, thousands and thousands of pies,
Speaker 1: and everybody throwing them left and right. Oh. I can
Speaker 1: see how that could appeal to a bohemian are kind
Speaker 1: of a hedonistic type dude like Henry Miller, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And then this film critic, this top film critic of
Speaker 1: the of the Age from nineteen forty nine, James A.
Speaker 1: G commented, thus Lee for Life magazine, And this is great.
Speaker 1: This is like such a poetic description of what's ultimately
Speaker 1: an absurd thing. The first pies were thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophically,
Speaker 1: then innocent bystanders began to get caught into the vortex
Speaker 1: a full pitch. It was armageddon, but everything was calculated
Speaker 1: so nicely that until late in the picture when Havoc
Speaker 1: took over, every pie made its special kind of point
Speaker 1: and then piled on its special kind of laughter. Wow.
Speaker 1: Just like it also reminds me of like again, this
Speaker 1: is such a trope, and a trope within a trope.
Speaker 1: At this point, that's scene in Wayne's World where I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's Wayne's World two where he's on the
Speaker 1: way to the wedding chapel to keep Christopher Walking from
Speaker 1: marrying Cassandra, and there's like the two dudes with the
Speaker 1: glass that are walking across the street and there's like
Speaker 1: chicken coops or something, you know what I mean, one
Speaker 1: of those scenes where everything that can go wrong does
Speaker 1: in this Rube Goldberg chain reaction. It's very expertly choreographed
Speaker 1: to you know, the if you look at the film, um,
Speaker 1: it really is a thing to behold, and four thousand pies,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to sneeze at. And like we talked about
Speaker 1: earlier in the previous episode, doing one of these sequences
Speaker 1: to get it wrong requires so much resetting, you know it,
Speaker 1: Literally everyone would have to change costumes and shower off.
Speaker 1: You can't get this wrong. It's like the scene where
Speaker 1: you blow up the entire town. You get it's gonna
Speaker 1: be an absolute disaster if you have to do it again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially because you want to go with practical effects. A
Speaker 1: c g I pie just won't cut it. And it's
Speaker 1: weird because the world of comedy for a time reacted
Speaker 1: against the pie troupe. By the time the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: come around, by the time Laura and Harder are doing
Speaker 1: this brilliant work, the public is tired of the custard
Speaker 1: pie bit. There were even comedies coming out that we're
Speaker 1: advertising the fact that they did not have a pie
Speaker 1: throwing scene, and like ads were so snarky back then.
Speaker 1: They would say things like a custard pie and pretty
Speaker 1: girl too in a bathing suit do not make a comedy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this would have absolutely become like the broadest comedy of
Speaker 1: the time, like the way we would think of like
Speaker 1: maybe gross out comedy today, like the Fairly Brothers movies.
Speaker 1: There no not not to diss the Fairly Brothers movies.
Speaker 1: Some of those are quite funny, but there are things
Speaker 1: that are considered low, you know, like in terms of
Speaker 1: critical circles. And obviously the Laurel and Hardy bit was
Speaker 1: high minded enough and absolutely genre busting that even the
Speaker 1: literati we're getting in on it and saying this is
Speaker 1: kind of cool. But that really was the high water
Speaker 1: mark for pie throwing, right and then after that it
Speaker 1: kind of became ghost to do it. And of course
Speaker 1: we're mentioning pies. A lot of our fellow listeners in
Speaker 1: the audience today may have wondered why we didn't mention
Speaker 1: one of the infamous trios Triumvit of comedy, a Trinity
Speaker 1: of slapstick, the Three Stooges. Between nineteen thirty and nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: they made like two hundred and twenty films, and they
Speaker 1: loved a pie gag, That's the thing. Then the whole
Speaker 1: position I was talking about earlier, I think was more
Speaker 1: like the critical perspective that this was, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of like old hat or old pie or whatever. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that the public didn't still kind of
Speaker 1: love it, and there was what you could maybe call
Speaker 1: a pie resurgence. Did it ever really leave? I don't know.
Speaker 1: The Three Stooges were kind of at the core of that,
Speaker 1: with those two hundred and twenty films, many of which
Speaker 1: were like pie films in the the it even had
Speaker 1: the word pie in the title films like in the
Speaker 1: Sweet Pie and Pie Yeah in one and Pies and
Speaker 1: Guys in nineteen fifty eight. And they even remade movies
Speaker 1: that had pie in the title, right. Yeah. So there
Speaker 1: was a nineteen five remake of Max Sinnett's The Great
Speaker 1: Pie Mystery. They just changed the title to Spook louder So.
Speaker 1: In this film, there's a segment where Larry, Moe and
Speaker 1: Curly are trying to control this weird machine that appears
Speaker 1: to throw pies out of thin air. And uh, it's
Speaker 1: not you know, it's not maybe the best work and though,
Speaker 1: but it's useful for our episode today. Well, they're catching
Speaker 1: up with the times right now, robots are throwing pies.
Speaker 1: This is like the brave new world of pie throwing.
Speaker 1: They have to like take it to the next level,
Speaker 1: right And Larry Fine would later recall that there was
Speaker 1: some blood, sweat and tears involved in the pie business.
Speaker 1: He said, sometimes we would run out of pies, so
Speaker 1: the prop man would sweep up the pie goop off
Speaker 1: the floor, complete with nails, splinters and tax and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, he still had what I'm just gonna arbitrarily
Speaker 1: called the Arbuckle problem from now on, which is you
Speaker 1: had to get people to convincingly appear as though they
Speaker 1: did not know a pie was coming your way. And
Speaker 1: so he talks about how they would fake each other
Speaker 1: out with this, the same way that maybe a nurse
Speaker 1: might fake out a kid who's getting a shot. They
Speaker 1: would say, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna count to three
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna throw it. But then you'd lean
Speaker 1: to the person throwing it and they would be like, okay,
Speaker 1: throw onto diabolical Yeah, and then no, you're absolutely right then.
Speaker 1: But it was really important to get that absolutely authentic reaction,
Speaker 1: otherwise the comedy wouldn't land, you know. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: now we've got the stooges Laurel and Hardy. They're big, big, big,
Speaker 1: and the pie throwing game, and a bunch of other
Speaker 1: people are copying them. Children's shows like The Little Rascals.
Speaker 1: They love a good pie throwing scene. Also to the
Speaker 1: earlier point, Bugs Bunny being very much descended from vaudeville,
Speaker 1: it's also throwing pies. And then you see you see
Speaker 1: an attempt to get towards more of that Hall of
Speaker 1: the Mountain King pie throwing madness. In a Little Rascal
Speaker 1: short nineteen thirty called Shivering Shakespeare, the kids are doing
Speaker 1: a play and then things ultimately to center into a
Speaker 1: bunch of adults throwing desserts and pies at kids and
Speaker 1: vice versa. That's right, Ben, And like we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: cartoons really started getting into the mix, because, as we know,
Speaker 1: there was a time where cartoons would you know, proceed
Speaker 1: like the feature or whatever. I mean that even happened,
Speaker 1: Like I remember a cartoon preceding Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Speaker 1: and a couple of other like Warner Brothers features that
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, there would be a cartoon
Speaker 1: before it. And obviously Pixar has kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: continued that tradition with all their Pixar shorts. But the
Speaker 1: Looney Tunes really kind of we're mimicking so many of
Speaker 1: these tropes that were so big in Hollywood and kind
Speaker 1: of like you know, making it even more absurd. And
Speaker 1: when you go back and watch some of the old
Speaker 1: Liney Tunes cartoons, you can really see the different styles
Speaker 1: of pie and represented like in Slick Hair, the Liney
Speaker 1: Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny is, you know, torturing Elmer
Speaker 1: Fudd as usual. They're working in some kind of bakery
Speaker 1: and he's tricking him into baking pies, only that hit
Speaker 1: him in the face with every single pie that he
Speaker 1: finishes making. And in that clip, Humphrey Bogart makes an appearance,
Speaker 1: of course, but those pies are custard. They're like dripping
Speaker 1: off of their faces with this kind of beige liquid.
Speaker 1: But there's also Bugs Bunny cartoons where you see another
Speaker 1: version of the pie that for like contrast reasons and
Speaker 1: you know, costume coloration reasons, they used blackberries. And when
Speaker 1: you see like the kind of heavier crusted pies dripping off,
Speaker 1: there's like different versions of it in all these Liney
Speaker 1: Tunes cartoons. I think that's such a cool mimicking of
Speaker 1: kind of the history of this. Yeah, and they're also
Speaker 1: something smart. They're mimicking the dependence upon pie throwing that
Speaker 1: earlier comedic minds did seem to have during that era
Speaker 1: proceeding the rise of Looney Tunes. But it doesn't in there.
Speaker 1: If we jump forward to the sixties and seventies, we
Speaker 1: see the same kind of commentary happening again. In mel
Speaker 1: Brooks Blazing Saddles four, there is a pie fight, but
Speaker 1: it's also satire, make in fun of Hollywood's reliance on
Speaker 1: the idea of the pie fight. So it became this
Speaker 1: sort of visual metaphor for unoriginal comedy exactly. Yeah, even Chaplain,
Speaker 1: you know, way back because he always kind of had
Speaker 1: his like finger on the pulse of what was going
Speaker 1: on in Hollywood and kind of trying to upend it
Speaker 1: and you know, sort of subvert a lot of these tropes,
Speaker 1: like right when they were happening, finger in the pie
Speaker 1: maybe a million percent um. And back in nineteen sixteen
Speaker 1: in a film that we mentioned in the previous episode
Speaker 1: behind the Screen, it is behind the scenes in a
Speaker 1: made up film studio showing this kind of like absurd
Speaker 1: dependence where like it's almost like a factory where large
Speaker 1: groups of actors are like lined up practicing their pie
Speaker 1: throwing skills because it was such an important thing that
Speaker 1: you had to like have special training, like some sort
Speaker 1: of Navy seals operation and the interstitial in what was
Speaker 1: a silent film, you know the ones where like they
Speaker 1: have the action and then some lines come on, says
Speaker 1: the comedy department rehearsing a new idea. And the idea
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixteen that it was a new idea was
Speaker 1: in and of itself like kind of mocking the whole practice, right,
Speaker 1: And now the pie fight itself doesn't just seem to
Speaker 1: be waning in popularity. Even the idea of making fun
Speaker 1: of pie throwing seems to have gotten a little bit old,
Speaker 1: but it hasn't disappeared. You'll always see a shout out
Speaker 1: popping up in the oddest places. We mentioned children's TV
Speaker 1: and part one of the series. But you know, I
Speaker 1: think a good pie to the face is never gonna
Speaker 1: quite go away, just because it's so easy, and now
Speaker 1: it's inherently its own kind of commentary. And not only
Speaker 1: will pie fighting probably never go away completely, but you
Speaker 1: can also see it in some very high minded films,
Speaker 1: perhaps most infamously in nineteen sixty four's Doctor Strange Love
Speaker 1: by Stanley kober Yeah. Well, you might not be able
Speaker 1: to see it in the actual cut of Stanley Kubrick's
Speaker 1: Doctor Strangelove. Maybe there's a version where you can get
Speaker 1: This deleted scene might be a little too early. It
Speaker 1: might have just been lost to time. But there apparently
Speaker 1: was a scene shot between the generals and the politicians
Speaker 1: in the war room. Because it's one of my favorite movies.
Speaker 1: I love Dr Strangelove so much, where they got into
Speaker 1: like a massive pie fight. I'm kind of glad they
Speaker 1: cut it. It seems like that would have been a
Speaker 1: little over the top. It's it's kind of subtle the
Speaker 1: way it is as extreme and bizarre as it gets.
Speaker 1: But that's so funny to know that that happened. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing is that the reason Kubrick decided to cut
Speaker 1: this scene is because he felt the actors playing the
Speaker 1: generals were having too much fun. Their jubilation, he said,
Speaker 1: felt inappropriate. And there's another political reason didn't make it
Speaker 1: in there. In this scene, Peter Sellers plays President Monthly,
Speaker 1: and the President Monthly is hit with a pie in
Speaker 1: the face as a general yells out quote, our gallant
Speaker 1: young president has been struck down in his prime. This
Speaker 1: scene was shot before the assassination of President JFK in
Speaker 1: November of nineteen sixty three, but the film wasn't released
Speaker 1: until afterwards, so they felt like it would have been
Speaker 1: a bad look to keep it in. Yeah, it's sort
Speaker 1: of the past equivalent of like removing shots of the
Speaker 1: World Trade Center, for example, in films that were you know,
Speaker 1: in production before that event happened, and even for many
Speaker 1: years after. Uh, those shots were removed, even from like
Speaker 1: the openings of long running television shows. Yep. And if
Speaker 1: you want to see the Laurel and Hardy epic pie
Speaker 1: fight that is now acknowledged as the pie fight to
Speaker 1: end all pie fights, you are in luck because for
Speaker 1: a long, long time this battle was lost to history.
Speaker 1: For decade, half of the short was missing. It was
Speaker 1: twenty minutes on two reels, and that second reel had
Speaker 1: been lost. So film historians have been trying to put
Speaker 1: in the gaps of the Battle of the Century with
Speaker 1: exploratory title cards, but these could never really replicate the
Speaker 1: work the actors have been doing. And so it wasn't
Speaker 1: until twenty fifteen when a toxicologist named John Mer salas
Speaker 1: toxicologist by day, that's his part Kent stuff. He's a
Speaker 1: he's a film collector and scholar. That's his superman at night.
Speaker 1: He's like a film scholar like Dexter, almost you know,
Speaker 1: like by day he's like working for the man, you know,
Speaker 1: like trying to right wrongs and solve crimes, and by
Speaker 1: nine he's doing this completely other thing, a little different.
Speaker 1: But that's so great that he is the one who
Speaker 1: kind of cracked the case on this, right. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he didn't realize what he had at first. He mentioned
Speaker 1: it at a film conference in Virginia. He put the
Speaker 1: real into his projector and he's played the film. And
Speaker 1: then as he looked at Laurel and Hardy walking down
Speaker 1: the street and has reported that New York Times article
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, he noticed he was seeing something he
Speaker 1: had never seen before. He saw the lead into the
Speaker 1: Pie Fight. He had seen the Banana Seller. And then
Speaker 1: right after that he started making plans to restore and
Speaker 1: reunite both reels. And so that is why now you
Speaker 1: can watch the Pie Fight as it was intended, thank god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the article in the New York Times comedy Sweet Weapon
Speaker 1: the Cream Pie was from and that was when kind
Speaker 1: of efforts to restore this were underway. You can at
Speaker 1: the very least watch this on YouTube, and I would
Speaker 1: hope that it exists in some kind of you know,
Speaker 1: restored like four K version. This seems like the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you should see in four K, but you
Speaker 1: can't find it on YouTube. If you just searched for
Speaker 1: Laurel and Hardy Battle of the Century, it's like three
Speaker 1: minutes forty seconds. If you're for by the People is
Speaker 1: like me, You can also receivably recreate your own pie fight.
Speaker 1: Just have that that. How about that as a mass
Speaker 1: post pandemic party, you just sign up where we get
Speaker 1: We'll we'll rent out a park, We'll get like a
Speaker 1: hundred something people in thousands of pies. Ah, I mean
Speaker 1: this needs to happen. Then this needs to be a
Speaker 1: yearly thing. I think we should bring it back. But
Speaker 1: let's not. And without talking about something that we alluded
Speaker 1: to earlier but didn't really follow through with Buster Keaton,
Speaker 1: we talked about how he was kind of like the
Speaker 1: brain behind the sort of elevation of the pie hit
Speaker 1: as an art form, and as it became so much
Speaker 1: more popular and then kind of waned in popularity, it
Speaker 1: became really important to use it for much less slapsticky
Speaker 1: and much more kind of cultural reasons. Right, So there
Speaker 1: became this language of who was okay to hit with
Speaker 1: a pie? And who was not who was fair game? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the this is the matter of pie ethics
Speaker 1: a heast the very end of episode one. Yes, not
Speaker 1: only was this a preemptive two parter, but we also
Speaker 1: followed through what they're going to do. So Keaton is
Speaker 1: in this interview with a storian and broadcaster named Studs Turkle,
Speaker 1: which is an awesome name. That's nineteen sixty two, and
Speaker 1: Keaton says, you know, you could hit the wrong people
Speaker 1: with a pie and getting an audience mad at you.
Speaker 1: There are certain characters you just don't hit with a pie.
Speaker 1: We found that out a long time ago. There are
Speaker 1: just certain people you do not hit with a pie.
Speaker 1: That's all there is to it. And he provided an
Speaker 1: example of this, didn't he. Yeah, and this is in
Speaker 1: the sixties. This guy is kind of like, you know,
Speaker 1: in his twilight years, and he still talks like a
Speaker 1: cartoon character. I wish we had tape of this, but
Speaker 1: we should. I want to put it in like a
Speaker 1: weird mid Atlantic, you know, early film accent. But I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna read it because the words say enough on
Speaker 1: their own. If I had a grand dame who was
Speaker 1: dogging it and putting it on a gray haired woman
Speaker 1: but so overbearing and everything else that the audience would
Speaker 1: like to hit her. Then you could hit her with
Speaker 1: a pie and they laugh their heads off. But if
Speaker 1: she was a legitimate old lady and a sincere character,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't dare hit her. If she's a phony, that's different.
Speaker 1: The same thing goes for a man. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing with any character where you have to, you know,
Speaker 1: empathize with the character, and if you don't, it's sort
Speaker 1: of like a minor villain. Right, this gray haired old
Speaker 1: woman who's overbearing and Keaton's mind is a minor villain
Speaker 1: who deserves some sort of retribution in the form of
Speaker 1: a pie in the face. And of course there are
Speaker 1: real incidents of actual people, often prominent politicians, thought leaders,
Speaker 1: being hit with pies. One of them was Bill Gates
Speaker 1: get hit the pie by a pie thrower named Noel Goden,
Speaker 1: writer and uh and god And targeted Bill Gates for
Speaker 1: this pie because he thought the guy was getting quote
Speaker 1: too haughty and so so there was a meeting between
Speaker 1: like the there's a meeting Brussels, Bill Gates, the Flemish
Speaker 1: minister and the president at the time and go to
Speaker 1: and step forward through cream pies at Bill Gates face,
Speaker 1: and then he just said, my work is finished here
Speaker 1: and Bill Gates, Old Billy g responds and like a
Speaker 1: pretty strange and and somewhat impressive way. The reports say
Speaker 1: that Gates was initially really startled, but then he tried
Speaker 1: to react casually. A little bit later he got cleaned up,
Speaker 1: and then he said, you know, I was just surprised
Speaker 1: because the pie wasn't all that good. Yeah. Well, as
Speaker 1: we everything we know about pie throwing says that, you know,
Speaker 1: maximum impact in a pie throw, it is not necessarily
Speaker 1: a delicious pie. Equal God, I'm surprised that the guy
Speaker 1: that did this didn't get like sniped by somebody up
Speaker 1: in a in a tree or a turret somewhere. I
Speaker 1: mean Bill Gates. That guys like a government into himself.
Speaker 1: That's right. This was I believe when he threw the pie.
Speaker 1: So maybe it was a slightly different time. But shout
Speaker 1: out to you pie throwers of the world. There's no
Speaker 1: one who should be considered above it, but there are
Speaker 1: some people who deserve dignity. We hope that we have
Speaker 1: alongside a slice of comedy history, we hope we have
Speaker 1: also given you a little Ala Mode of pie Ethics. Yum.
Speaker 1: You can find us on the internet. We are Ridiculous
Speaker 1: History on all the places you find podcasts on the internet.
Speaker 1: You can also find Ben and I as individual human persons.
Speaker 1: I am at how now Noel Brown on Instagram. Throw
Speaker 1: a digital pie my way over on Twitter where I'm
Speaker 1: at Ben Boland hs W or you know, toss me
Speaker 1: some of your favorite bits of comedy history over at
Speaker 1: Instagram where I'm at Ben Boland. That's bow l I
Speaker 1: n big big pie in the face, well deserved to
Speaker 1: our friend slash nemesis Jonathan Strickland a k. The Quister
Speaker 1: huge thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. He
Speaker 1: doesn't get a pie unless he, you know, is in
Speaker 1: the mood for a pie. Christopher A sciotis here in
Speaker 1: spirit our research associate extraordinary Gabe Luizier. You know I
Speaker 1: would throw I could see Christopher because he plays such
Speaker 1: an excellent straight man. I could see him being a
Speaker 1: pie victim in fiction, but I don't know a very
Speaker 1: dead pan reaction right exactly. Yes, I can visualize it now.
Speaker 1: Thanks also, of course, through super producer Casey Pegram our
Speaker 1: producers Andrew Howard and Max Williams and Noel. Thanks to you, man,
Speaker 1: Thanks thanks for not sabotaging with a pie low these
Speaker 1: many years. It's it's gonna be very difficult to do
Speaker 1: it through the zoom, Ben, But maybe I could rig
Speaker 1: up some elaborate device that would secret I could spirit
Speaker 1: into your home that on the push of a giant
Speaker 1: red button would slap you in the face with a pie.
Speaker 1: Or has somebody done this already a delivery service. That's
Speaker 1: like the old singing telegrams back in the day where
Speaker 1: someone opens up the door and you just say, you know,
Speaker 1: like you just say like kind regards from Ben and Noel.
Speaker 1: They throw a pie at you when they run away.
Speaker 1: That that would be a dangerous job. That's basically assault.
Speaker 1: That's a non consensual pie. Then we talked about this.
Speaker 1: You have you have to have you have to have
Speaker 1: consent for for the pie in the face. Man, this
Speaker 1: was a fun one. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.