Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Pie-In-The-Face Gag

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Throwing a pie in someone’s face was groundbreaking comedy once upon a time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here to standing in for Dave. This is short stuff. That's right. Let's go. Let's go.

Yeah, we're talking about the old comedy bed of getting a pie thrown in your face. It looks like you've sourced this from a bunch of different great places. Yeah, let's see, Gary Burman on Medium Road a great one. Today I found out mental floss, Atlas Obscurus, late. All the old hits. Yeah, exactly.

Websites we've left 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 that a person who gets hit in the face. It completely demeans them momentarily and that's right. It also gives them the opportunity to laugh it 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 Vodville in the late 1800s with Canadian performer name 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 it. That age old story. Everyone laughed at this for 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 your sorry. Yeah, your hose head. Yeah, 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 1909 film starring Ben Turpin, who was a really beloved cross-eyed comedian. We're talking like, these are silent movies at the time, right?

They were talking about. I bet that worked as a advantage. Right. It was a movie called Mr. Flip. And the reason why we're not sure that that's the first one is because apparently the movie Mr. 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 100% 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 1913 a movie called The Noise From The Deep. Yeah, and this star sounded like sort of the first female comedian of the day, a 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 needed 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, I mean so There's another term for the pie in the face gag. It's called pie-ing. 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

it gets a huge laugh. We're going to put this in every single film that we put out from now on. And just a few short years, it kind of became fairly trite. Yeah. A movie from 1916 with Charlie Chaplin called Behind the Screen was sort of making fun of it. All right. And yeah, so that went from what 1913 to 1916, and it had been so overdone. So I get the idea that it kind of went away or it flew out of fashion until 1927 when Laurel and Hardy made battle of the century and Stan Laurel was like,

we're gonna do this so extremely and with so many pies, we're basically gonna 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 4,500 pies. 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 many pies. It's just nuts. And apparently 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 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 cutting 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 4,500 buys? I believe so. That's awesome. Yeah. It went on to be, kind of had a second life after that in the late 1920s and early 30s. Little rascals were doing it. Three stuages were doing it.

Buster Keaton basically explained that they are sort of unwritten rules for the bit, which is if you're going to hit someone in the face, it's got to be someone who deserves it, like a phony, someone that needs a comeuppance, nobody that's earnest, like it was, oftentimes it was like a very snooty, high society person that was kind of, it 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, so you're right? Yeah, they had figured out along the way there's a certain way that you should bake a pie and you should bake it to brittleness for one because you wanted 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 baked 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, and before we get emails, I realize they don't still make them out of 10. We did our aluminum podcast recently. That's right. I know they're aluminum. Yeah. But you know what, I mean, 10 plates. You know what the biggest rip though is, 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, 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, you're right. I had a pie in the face birthday party when I was probably 10 or 11.

Oh, that would have. We just had the little flimsy tins and a bunch of cool whips. No, 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 20 pies. No, I know. I really just let you. Yeah, I know.

Walk that one out. Sit it that one. I have to say, 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 was a shaving cream.

It was cool whip. I don't know. It's at least a taste in it, all right. Yes, it definitely tasted all right. It just doesn't feel right on the face. All right. Well, let's was a shaving cream. It was cool. I don't know, it's at least a taste in it, right? Yes, it definitely tasted all right. It just doesn't feel right on the face. All right, well, let's take a break. Yes. I'll apologize to Josh more sincerely off my, and we'll be back right after this. Juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, juh, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, chak, I was stunned and I just said no. We're killing people. You may never have to face that decision when you find yourself at that line.

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People like me have been screaming for years. We've got to watch the Supreme Court what they're doing is wrong, what they're doing is evil. They will take things away, and I can only hope that dobs is that like Pearl Harbor moment. Girl, you and I both know what it took to just get through the day in New York City

and get home in one piece. And so the fact that we're here and what you've achieved and what I've achieved, you know, that's momentous. It's not just sitting around complaining about some bills. The only reason that you might think, as Chase said, that we're always measurable, is because people are constantly attacking us and we're constantly noticing it. Listen to the LeBerncock Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. are constantly attacking us and we're talking about Buster Keaton talking about some of the rules of the game or of the bit. Another one was, you know, 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 going to flinch. And a 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 gotta 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 figured 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 and then the light for dark hair. Like a peach or an apple or something. And you mentioned 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 meringue, you wanted to use shaving cream because it doesn't spoil. That's a big one, right? It can get kind of hot on the studio set. In particular, when it's in what, late May. So there was a film, it came out in 1963 or 1964, it's called The Great Race and it promised an even bigger pie fight than the great battle. Their 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 that's probably when they moved to shaving cream.

Right. So people were better at it than others. You could get a real reputation 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 Mohawar to the stooages 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 he chose. 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 you're 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 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 never been a good idea, but it's less so now, more than ever. But yeah, I mean, everyone from Bill Gates to Rupert Murdock has been pied in the face very publicly. Yep. And apparently the guy who did that first was a guy named Thomas Forsade. he was the founder of High Times. And he did it in like 1970.

And eventually I picked up, there was a group called the Biotic Baking Brigade out of San Francisco who were big into this in like the 80s and 90s. Yeah, and so they, you know, they're on record as saying like, you know, how about a neo-Nazi or a clansman, 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 pie? Yeah. Who to pie? Chuck said that, of course that means short stuff's out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

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