Somehow I didn’t realize that Soupy Sales was born 100 years ago the other day. You’d think that I, with my dedication to the pie in the face, would have had the date marked, but…alas, I didn’t. I don’t know if it can ever be established what human has received the most pies in their face, but Soupy Sales would have to be in the mix. Now, he did mostly use shaving cream, but I don’t judge here. We’re talking about a guy who was so well-liked and so well-known for his pies that he actually had Frank Sinatra agreeing to appear on his show on the condition that he get pied.
Here is Soupy Sales on the delivering end. Joan Rivers was a good sport here.
There are times when people are using a particular implement to do a task, but they think they need to be helping it along. Lots of times we reject the idea that there’s a passive element in what we’re trying to accomplish. When I first used an angle grinder, the guy I was working with had to admonish me several times: “Don’t press on it! That thing’s whirling around at however many thousand RPMs, and you know it’s working because you can see all those sparks! Let the tool do the work!”
Huh.
I’ve heard similar sentiments from Gordon Ramsay, many times over the years as I’ve watched him on this or that cooking show, most of them competition shows featuring cooks who aren’t as experienced. They’re trying to cook this thing or that dish and they get a key component into the pan and then they start futzing with it. Moving it around. Flipping it a lot. Poking it. Prodding it. And Ramsay just says, “Use a hot pan, keep the pan hot, and let the pan do the work.”
Which brings to me to a beloved topic of mine that I haven’t written about much in a while: the ever-amazing, eternally-wonderful pie in the face.
Let the pie do the work, folks!
What on Earth am I talking about now?!
Well, here’s a video. This has been on YouTube for years, and every once in a while the YT algorithm serves it up to me. A woman lost a bet with someone on the Red Sox, and her fate for losing is to get a pie in her face. The pie is a big beautiful thing…but…well, here it is:
So, just from the image that defaults as the video’s cover, you’re probably already thinking that this is a fantastic pieing! Look at all that cream and crust splattering onto her shoulders and neckline. Surely her face is going to be delightfully plastered with a thick layer of whipped cream and (I think) chocolate pudding and chunks of crust. That would be a fair expectation, until you actually watch this guy’s delivery and see his error:
He doesn’t let the pie do the work!
All he has to do is plant the pie in her face, hold it there for a second or two, maybe give it a single partial twist, and then…step away. That’s it! Trust me, folks, a thick cream pie is a sticky affair. For at least the first few seconds, most of that whipped-creamy goodness is going to adhere to the victim’s face. If you need to, you can pull the tin off their face, if it sticks there and you didn’t pull it away when you delivered the pie, thus revealing her in all her pie-faced glory. At least, that’s what this guy should have done.
But…no.
He decides he’s going to help the pie, so he spends like fifteen whole seconds rubbing the tin around her face and, I don’t know, grinding the pie in there or something. I don’t know what he thinks he was accomplishing, but when he finally pulls the tin away, what has happened?
He has literally used the pie to wipe itself off her face!
Yup, by the time he’s done, her face isn’t delightfully covered with whipped cream and custard; instead her face is mainly slimy with some crust chunks on it. It’s terrible. Just terrible.
When you hit someone in the face with a pie, the second the pie’s forward momentum into their face is stopped, so is your job. Your work is done. Step back, admire, laugh, cheer, whatever. Let the pie do the work.
For some other helpful pointers, here’s a bit of instructional help from the old TBS Dinner and a Movie show. Remember that? When they’d show a movie but interspersed throughout was a comedy cooking show based on the movie of the evening? I have no idea what movie might have prompted them to include this, but this is all sage advice. Note that Paul Gilmartin, the male half of this duo (the other is Annabelle Gurwitch, on whom I may have nursed a small crush back in the day), actually says as much: “You don’t gotta knock me into the next kitchen. Just put it on there and let it do its work!”
Yeah, all of that. Let the pie do its work, people. (Unless you’re using a meringue pie, because for this purpose those are useless. Meringue will not stick to the face.)
Another year, another Pi Day that I didn’t observe with anything new…sigh…but here’s a repost of an earlier celebration!
It’s Pi Day, everyone!
It is also Albert Einstein’s birthday and, sadly, this year’s edition marks the passing of Stephen Hawking, about which I’ll have more to say later. But for now, let’s celebrate Pi!
(That one’s titled “Pi Day” but the video has nothing to do with Pi so far as I can see, but it’s a cool video anyway, so there it is.)
This is from several years ago, made for a supermarket chain called D&W Fresh Market in Michigan:
And finally, here I am, in my last (well, most recent, I hope it’s not my last!) official video observing Pi Day! As I look at this, I see the video’s running time and I wonder why on Earth I didn’t trim it down another 32 seconds….
Today is National Pie Day, which no one seems to really observe anymore seeing as how we’ve adopted March 14, “3.14”, as the quasi-official Pi Day on which we celebrate pie in addtion to pi. But anyway, that being the case, here is Henry Mancini’s “Pie in the Face Polka”, which he wrote to score the enormous pie fight in the movie The Great Race.
This article is a couple years old, but it showed up on some feed or other that I follow, so here it is.
But working at the absolute capacity of their home kitchens, for a year straight, means burnout is very real. Multiple chefs I spoke to said their houses were full of pastry boxes and their fridges full of butter and freezers full of ice cream; they cooled cakes in stages on tiny counters and used stimulus money to buy equipment; their plants are long dead and their kitchens reek of fryer oil; their phone won’t stop binging, and when their oven died, they switched to steamed and boiled desserts. For all of them, home is no longer merely home: It’s the world’s worst commercial kitchen, with a bedroom attached. They welcome press, but they hope their landlord doesn’t see the photos.
I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.
Honestly, I can’t see getting nostalgic about the stick shift. I drove one for years, and I do not miss it a single bit. How about you, folks?
My results weren’t fantastic! A couple are obvious, but several were either process-of-elimination or pure guesswork. Still, it’s a fun exercise! And of course, I feel it necessary to offer up a few additions! Recognize any of these folks through pie-obscured features?
If you Google it, several dates come up (July 1 is one), but the most common is November 27. I’ve no idea why November 27 is the date for this, unless the idea is that November 27 is usually after Thanksgiving, so there’s likely to be leftover pie left about (though pumpkin pie would never be my choice for this application). Seems to me the birthdate of one of the fine comedy film stars of a century ago: perhaps Ben Turpin’s on September 19, as Turpin is thought to be the first recipient on film of a pie in the face, or maybe Mabel Normand’s on November 9, as she is sometimes credited with throwing the first pie in a face. This era of film history is pretty hazy, since most of the films don’t even exist anymore, and surely the notion of dispatching messy food into someone’s face didn’t just come out of nowhere, never done before, sometime in the 1910s.
Of course, I grew up seeing people getting pied all the time on shows in the 70s, both on variety shows and sitcoms. Three’s Company had a memorable episode in which every cast member was on the receiving end:
From THREE’S COMPANY: “The Bakeoff”. Suzanne Sommers (left) has just hit herself in the face with a pie before Joyce DeWitt (right) could do it for her.
From THREE’S COMPANY: “The Bakeoff”. John Ritter (center) has just had two pies smashed simultaneously into his face, by Norman Fell (left) and Audra Lindley (right).
And variety shows! Remember the Mike Douglas Show? They had Moe of the Three Stooges on once to declaim on pieing, and since HEE HAW was commonly on in my household during my formative years, it’s not hard to look back at that show and see more bits of my personality locking into place:
Johnny Cash plants a pie in Archie Campbell’s face. Note the overalls!
I mean, really: Between the ages of 4 and, say, 9, I was exposed to: Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, John Williams, bib overalls, and pies in the face. That’s a lot of influence to pack into a few years!
The pie in the face continues trucking right along, though it maybe isn’t quite the comedic staple it once was. You still see it showing up these days in fundraisers (“If we raise $1000 for St. Bob’s Hospital, Dr. Weisenheimer will get a pie in the face!”) and still once in a while in political protest (a scenario of which I am not a fan, to be honest). A pie in the face is the payoff in a lot of pranks nowadays (example), and again I’m not a big fan of this: the whole “unwitting victim” thing might work in a fictional comedy, but less so in real life, I think. A new odd subset of the pie in the face is sports mascots that have made pies a part of their schtick; these are kind of a middle-ground because the recipients aren’t entirely unwitting. If you see these mascots coming in your direction, you probably know a pie is ending up in someone’s face, so you can take measures to ensure it’s not yours, maybe! (And if it happens to someone you’re with, be prepared for their natural reaction to you laughing at them.)
There was a pie fad in baseball several years ago, when pies would be dispatched post-victory into the faces of players who had performed on-field heroics, but sadly, baseball’s Fun Police, fearing pie-related injury, apparently put the kibosh on that:
A pie in the face should NEVER hurt and it should NEVER cause injury! Pie safely, people!
And in pandemic times such as ours, the pie in the face doesn’t have to be forgotten! It just takes good aim, like Blake Edwards demonstrates in this production photo from The Great Race:
Director Blake Edwards (left) exhibits perfect aim with a pie he has thrown into the face of actress Natalie Wood (right).
In comedy situations, obviously the usual reaction is going to be stunned indignation:
From SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN: Jean Hagen (right) reacts to being hit with a cake (not a pie, but it counts) by Debbie Reynolds (left), which had been intended for Gene Kelly (center).
But a pie in the face can also be an occasion for happiness and cheer, as these two friends apparently demonstrate:
More recently, just the other day friend of this blog Roger Green pointed out a recent dearth of pie-related content around here. This has certainly not been for lack of trying, though it’s not a frequent thing. Last fall a friend and former coworker of mine, who is also an amateur actress and has played a part in previous pie-related shenanigans, and I attempted collaborating on a “How to Give and Receive a Pie in the Face” video. It was fun to shoot, but alas, the footage really isn’t usable, because it was a really windy day. Not only did the camera mike pick up the wind howling (it actually makes the day sound worse than it was), but the wind actually made the camera vibrate slightly! We hope to film the concept again at some point, using a better camera-and-mike set-up, but I am able to cull stills from the footage:
Splat! Yes, that’s me. I applied a Prisma filter to this screencap.
More recently, this same friend and I got together to film a short gift exchange when she got a new lucrative job. We celebrated with an exchange of gifts: I gave her a bottle of rum that she and her husband like, and she gave me a pie in the face.
That was no store-bought pie, either–I actually made that thing for the express purpose being smashed in my face. The thing had to weigh a good two pounds! I felt that pie when it landed. Didn’t hurt, though! It should never hurt!
So, Happy Pie in the Face Day, y’all! If you celebrate, pie responsibly: Don’t surprise your recipient, don’t hit them so hard it hurts, and don’t use shaving cream! And if you’re on the receiving end, well–just laugh and enjoy it. And then go get a towel.
