Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, standing in for Dave. This is short stuff, So that's right, let's go.
Yeah, we're talking about the old comedy bit of getting a pie thrown in your face. It looks like you source this from a bunch of different great places.
Yeah, let's see. Gary Berman on Medium wrote a great one today. I found out Mental Flaws Atlas, Obscure Slate, all the old hits.
Yeah, exactly, websites we've loved for years. Yeah.
So you know the idea that in comedy, nothing is funnier than somebody throwing a pie in somebody's face.
Right, Yeah, it does something really special to the person who gets hit in the face. It completely demeans them momentarily, and it also gives them the opportunity to laugh at off and suddenly shift gears with their personality and win the crowd over. Or it can drive them to really dig into their personality and get really mad about something that is actually kind of comical.
That's right.
And it looks like this whole thing started back in vaudeville in the late eighteen hundreds with a Canadian performer named Doc Kelly, and Kelly, as the story goes, saw a I guess a cook throw a piece of pie at a stable boy.
Everyone laughed at that age old story. Everyone laughed at this poor stable boy.
And Kelly was like, now that's funny, A but you hit him in the shirt. It'd be a whole lot better if you hit him in the face and just said you're sorry.
Yeah, your hose head, your hose head.
And then before you know it, it became a thing. And then before you know it, it was in movies.
Yeah, pretty quickly. There's a discrepancy over what movie it was in. First, there's a nineteen oh nine film starring Ben Turpan, who was a really beloved cross eyed comedian, and we're talking like these are silent movies at the time, right, I.
Bet that worked his advantage. Right.
It was a movie called Mister Flip. And the reason why we're not sure that that's the first one is because apparently the movie Mister Flip is totally gone forever. Yeah, no one preserved it and probably caught fire at some point.
Only descriptions, like written descriptions of the film exist, So we're not one hundred percent sure so you fast forward a few years and then we know for a fact that the first movie that we can document where a pie in the face gag shows up is in nineteen thirteen a movie called The Noise from the Deep.
Yeah, and this starred sounded like sort of the first female comedian of the day, Mabel Norman. She was known as the female Charlie Chaplin and a very young Fatty Arbuckle in the movie. And key to this was it was produced by Keystone Studios, and they became very much known as the studio that does a lot of this pie in the face bit such that they eaten heeded their own bakery to bake all these pies for all their movies that they were pumping out.
Yeah, that's the same Keystone Studios that made the Keystone Cops. Yeah, or I should say the Keystone Cops kind of made the Keystone Studios. You know what I'm saying. No, no, you mean so, there's another term for the pie in the face gag.
It's called pieing.
I can't stand that word for some reason. It's just wrong. But regardless of that, it caught on really really quickly, Like people are like, I love that it gets a huge laugh. We're gonna put this in every single film that we put out from now on. In just a few short years, it kind of became fairly trite.
Yeah, A movie from nineteen sixteen with Charlie Chaplin called
Behind the Screen was sort of making fun of it already. Yeah, so that went from what nineteen thirteen to nineteen sixteen, it had been so overdone, So I get the idea that it kind of went away or a little out of fashion until nineteen twenty seven when Laurel and Hardy made Battle of the Century and Stan Laura was like, we're gonna do this so extremely and with so many pies, We're basically going to end it all and no one will ever be able to do this again because we
did the ultimate pie in the face bit right.
They actually started with forty five hundred pies.
Yeah, that'll do it.
Probably the biggest order that the Los Angeles Pie Company ever filled. And yeah, I mean, like, if you stop and think about that, that's so so many pies, it's just nuts. And apparently they're the versions of Battle of the Century today is so edited that the pie the pieing sorry that happens throughout the movie it's impressive, but apparently it just doesn't even hold a candle to the original version, and they really did, you know, deliver on Stan Laurel's vision.
Right, it's on the cunning room floor.
Actually, I believe that they found they found either a second reel or the original version or something like that not too long ago in the basement of some I think maybe usc.
Oh cool. Yeah, so they got all forty five hundred pies, I believe. So that's awesome.
Yeah, it went on to be kind of had a second life after that. In the late nineteen twenties and early thirties, little rascals were doing it. Three Stooges were doing it. Buster Keaton basically explained that they were sort of unwritten rules for the bit, which is, if you're going to hit someone in the face, like, it's got to be someone who deserves it, like a phony, someone that needs to come up, and nobody that's earnest like
it was. Oftentimes it was like a very snooty high society person that you kind of was a way of putting someone in their place.
Yeah, if there was a pie on the screen, like on the table, and there was a person wearing a tuxedo. That person was probably going to get a pie in the face.
Yeah, and the pies were pretty specific too.
Right, Yeah, they had figured out along the way there's like a certain way that you should bake a pie. And you should bake it to brittleness for one, because you want it to shatter. You should also double layer the crust so that you can handle it from the bottom, just the pie, because they used to serve pies or bake pies in like tin pie tins still do. Yes, if you throw that at somebody, it can cut their face wide open. It's a really bad idea to do that.
So you can only throw the actual pie, which is why they doubled up the crust and then also made it brittle, and then when it hits the face, that crust shatters and just spreads the pie everywhere.
Yeah, before we get emails, I realize they don't still make them out of ten. We did our aluminum podcast recently. I know they're aluminum, yeah, but you know what I mean, tin plates. You know what the biggest rip though, is.
Later on in like modern era, when someone would.
Spoof this, maybe they just do they just put like they don't even have filling.
It's not even real pie. There's no crust.
They would just like take a pie tin and whip cream it or shaving cream it up, and that's just such a cheap way out, Like it's so much better. But it's a real pie and you've got like a blueberry all over your face.
Yeah, that is a big distinction. But not all of us can afford blueberry filling.
Chuck. Well, yeah, I had a.
Pie in the face birthday party when I was probably ten or eleven. We just had the little flimsy tins and a bunch of cool whips. Nope, you wouldn't have liked my birthday party that year.
No, I would have loved it.
I'm sure in that case, it's a little different. I didn't expect, like your mom to bake twenty pis.
No, I know, I really just let you.
Yeah, I walk that one out.
I have to say. The just my memory of that is, even at a young age, I was like, this cool whip on the face feels really gross.
It's really oily. Yeah, this is not right.
Well cool whip or was it shaving cream? It was cool whip, so at least it tasted all right.
Yes, it definitely. It definitely tasted all right, just doesn't feel right on the face.
All right, Well, let's take a break.
Yeah, I'll apologize to Josh more sincerely off and we'll be back right after this.
Softly jawsh.
Sh soft you.
S all right.
So we were talking about Buster Keaton talking about some of the rules of the game or of the bit. Another one was, you know, it's a lot of times someone would like turn around and get the pie right in the face. That was kind of how the bit went. And he was like, you can't turn around too early or you're gonna flinch, and af flinch ruins everything because we have to reshoot it, which means we have to reset.
And you've got BlackBerry in your hair, so we got to do you know, wash you up and hair and makeup and change your wardrobe. So it was a big pain to redo that. So don't turn around too early or you'll flinch. And also they figure out that like because most of this stuff was black and white, or all of it was at the time black and white, the darker feeling works better if you have blonde hair right, and then.
The light for dark hair right like a peach or an apple.
Or something, and you mentioned it earlier before the break, when you asked if it was cool whip or shaving cream. They figured out that, like, you actually don't want real filling. I mean, sure, you want something that looks like BlackBerry or something like that, but if you're looking for like marangu, you wanted to use shaving cream because it doesn't spoil. That's a big one, right, It can get kind of hot on a studio set, in particular when it's in
what late may probably. Yeah, So there was a film. It came out in nineteen sixty three or sixty four. It's called The Great Race, and it promised an even bigger pie fight than the Great Battle or Battle of the Century. Had it didn't deliver. It's still pretty impressive,
but nothing like that. And they shot this pie fight scene at the beginning of Memorial Day weekend, and they took a long weekend, and when they came back, the pies that they had left on the wall because they needed to pick up the shoot from that point on had all spoiled, and apparently the cast and crew were gagging.
It was that nasty.
Yeah, And then that's probably when they moved to shaving cream.
That's right.
So people were better at it than others. You could get a real reputation as a as a champion pie thrower. As legend has it, Fatty Arbuckle could throw one with each hand in opposite directions and hit the faces. And apparently Mo Howard of the Stooges was so good at it he did all the off camera throwing and then got hired out to throw pies off camera just in other movies that shows.
Yeah, man, that guy was just amazing through and through what a specialty. So, like I was saying, like the reason why pies in the face started out is being funny, and it's still funny today, but it's just been around for so long it's kind of like a nod to the idea of being funny.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
Agreed, sure, But the whole premise is that, like you said, you're taking somebody down a peg. And so it's not that surprising that it eventually kind of spilled out in real life where people have have taken to hitting powerful people in the face with pies to kind of show them that they're and show the world they're not this god god among humans, you.
Know, Yeah, which you know, these days, if you approach anything any big famous person like that was something in your hand to hit them with. It's it's never been a good idea, but it's less so now more than ever. But yeah, I mean everyone from like Bill Gates to to Rupert Murdoch has been pied in the face very publicly.
Yep.
And apparently the guy who did that first was a guy named Thomas Forsaid. He was the founder of High Times and maybe seventy and eventually like got picked up. There was a group called the Biotic Baking Brigade out of San Francisco who were big into this in like the eighties and nineties.
Yeah, and so they you know, they're on record saying like, you know, how about a neo Nasimi, neo Nazi or a Klansman like they're great people to Pie or maybe a homophobic preacher go Pie one of them.
Yeah.
I think they had like literature and pamphlets that suggested that who to Pia? Who to Pai? Chucks of that of course, that means short stuff's out.
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