Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super producer Casey Pagrib, Shout out to our guest producers Max William Andrew Howard. Let's welcome them all within inaugural pie in the face. That's how he hates people here on Ridiculous History. I've been I have been in a pie fight, have you know? I have not been, but this news of this inaugural hazing situation as news to me. I've never ever gotten a pie in the face. Ben. It sounds really unpleasant and messy and sticky. It's it's fun. I've I've done it mainly under the auspices of sketch comedy, so I knew the pie was coming, and I think that's a key factor in how one receives a pie to the face. It definitely is been. You know, my first exposure to pies in the face was probably on Nickelodeon shows like Doubledare, and you can't do that on television and stuff, and obviously by that point it's such a cliche. Amazingly for for the right reasons, cliche thing in comedy and to see them kind of like revive it, you know for a younger audience, is that it's it's inspiring. Ben, after doing the research for this episode, Yeah, yeah, it's one of those legendary physical comedy or slapstick tropes up there with slipping on a banana peel, which is much more difficult than it looks. I don't want to go into the nuts and bolts of why I tried to figure that out. But even if you are one of those are people who says I don't really like comedy, your says that I don't know someone, some imaginary person who is just all set to have a really wholesome change of heart, hopefully maybe in this episode. Uh, this is the thing. Pie throwing is going to be familiar with anybody, even if you don't consider yourself a fan of comedy or slapstick comedy specifically. And when you look into it like we did along with Gabe, our research associate, what you'll find is that it has a very, very surprisingly long history, so much so that our history of the pie in the face gag is going to be a two parter. We couldn't fit all of it in one episode. Could we know? We couldn't. And this is the rare but increasingly less rare, proactive two parter, So here we are, So Here we are, Here we Are. It's funny if you think about why slapstick had such a day in the sun for so long, what you learn is that it since to you slapstick comedy during the era of silent film silent moving pictures, because you know, it was way easier to show a joke to the audience than tell them about it. And you know, that's still sort of like an important ethos in filmmaking. They always say show don't tell. That's why, like voiceover narration is considered kind of a hackneyed and cliche technique. I'm looking at you, Ridley Scott with Blade Runner original cut, But then I think he made up for it in the director's cut. But it's true and and it's not only because of the show don't tell idea, because there literally was no sound with which to tell the contrast and the way you know, early film and early comedy was was shot was such that a pie had a perfect level of color to make it pop in the frame. Yeah, that's a good point there. And it's also true that this phenomenon does not originate with silent film. It goes back to the days of the vaudeville circuit. That's where we first see documented purposeful cases of tossing a pie at someone's face for a laugh, and it was always extra funny to the vaudeville audience if the victim was real posh and real fancy. Seeing someone dressed as a hobo get hit with a pie is not as subversive as seeing, you know, someone dressed as the Duke of um Earl on water, but getting hit with totally. It's because inherently, you know, kind of lowers your guard or cuts you down to size, you know, if you're some kind of high salutant swell and then like the humble tramp hits you in the face with a pie. It's a way of kind of like normalizing everyone, and like it's like allowing you to kind of laugh at yourself or be really grumpy and you know, stamp away and a huff. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also there's some good comedic theory that goes into this as well. It's part of a larger structure, you could say, of the ideas of good narrative storytelling, which is there must be a status switch. It's interesting for the audience of one of low status, you know, goes from poper to prints, if someone of high status goes in the opposite direction, and a pie fight is a very quick way to do that. It's also a beautiful way to end a story that doesn't really have an ending, right. A lot of silent films above little bits are just kind of here is an anthology of things that we think are funny. How do we end it? That's right, And in the earliest days of it, back in the pre filmed days, it was definitely used as a device to like break up a sketch or you know, kind of change gears right, because it's sort of like, is this event that then everyone has to remark upon, and then it gives you almost this like like a sleight of hand ability to kind of change course and then have people like focus on one thing and then now they're looking at the new scene that's kind of formed around it. Yeah, it's got some of the similar vibes to the famous Benny Hill Chase montages. They're like, let's just make it as Steve Massa described absurd, antarctic, and funny. That's him speaking about the cream pie fight as a visual non sequitur in an excellent New York Times article called comedy Sweet Weapon the cream Pie, But Noel. When we are looking at the history of the pie fights or the pie in the face, if we are looking to the world of film, it seems like opinions differ on which silent film had the quote first pie fight. We've got like three different opinions here, and now it's borderline controversial. Band. Do you think it's okay for us to wade into these waters? I think, you know what, I think we can throw a pie or two of conversation here and maybe we can talk. Maybe after we go through the first three, we can figure out which one we think is more likely. What I am completely with you. So one of the first examples comes from Gilbert M. Bronco Billy Anderson's film Mr. Flip, which came out nineteen o nine. I'm not gonna lie. I had to go off Mike for a second, be like, was there really there was film in nineteen o nine. I feel like I'm obviously not a Hollywood historian, but the stuff absolutely fascinates me, and it follows it's sort of like, you know, I mean, it's this guy's kind of a hell. He's this abusive store manager, like of a general store in a town, played by Ben Turpin, and that's Mr Flip And he gets a pie to the face as is not fine why I'm laughing after sexually harassing every single woman that he encounters. That's sort of his thing. That's he's a hell. But again, that device, that cream pie allows some sort of like visual representation of him being cut down to size and uh, kind of getting his retribution for all of that, you know, awful hellish behavior. Yes. Also nineteen o nine, that's the year that newspaper reporting of the Jersey Devil the cryptod exploded. That has nothing to do with today's episode. I'm just kind of on an info dump getting rid of all these things I learned full disclosure exactly has something to do with what we talked about earlier today. It all kind of bleeds together. What are we talking about history or cryptids? It's it's all kind of, you know, two sides of the same coin. Here's something I also didn't know. Mabel Norman, who is one of the great woman comedians of all time comedians, and I always like to say that, but who knows that that's even appropriate. She was called often by the press the female chaplain, which seems dismissive, but you know, it was the It was the nineteen tense. And she in a nineteen thirteen comedy called A Noise from the Deep directed by Max Sennett, she throws a pie on film at Fatty r Buckle. Max Sennet, the director also known as the quote father of slapstick comedy. So those are two of our big contenders for first pie throne. But unfortunately you can't see a copy of A Noise from the Deep today. No princes of the film are known to exist, and so the pie in question has become a little bit of a passion project. Intrepid entertainment historians and the right right and a lot of them rely on help from early descriptions of the scene at the time by people who were able to watch the film, including the author Andy Edmonds. That's right. Andy Edmonds wrote a book on Fatty Arbuckle called Frame Up, and she recounts kind of in the oral tradition, this event that may or may not have happened exactly like that, and I love everything about this. So apparently the crew of the shoot, we're looking for some way, like we said, to break up a comedy sequence, and there was some you know, I have craft services, I guess. There was a pile of pastries on a nearby craft services tray or table, and Fatty or Roscoe, as his mother called him, um saw an opportunity here for comedy gold. And he grabbed one of these pies and he called Mabel over and handed it to her and instructed her to throw the pie in his Yeah, and Senate the director couldn't hear what they were saying, and our Buckle wouldn't tell him. It was probably like, I don't want to lose the magic. Just trust me, bro, just roll the cameras. So he said, okay, I trust you. He let the cameras roll, and he used a wide angle, and then at some point in the scene, Mabel took a pie, reared back, and then flu popped it into our Buckle's face. Everybody cracked up while filming it, which is a good sign audiences felt the same way, and this became part of the primary foundation of film slapstick, and then from there, you would see a pie throwing scene in all sorts of comedies, both by Senate because he was not above using the same gag multiple times, and by his competitors and his rivals. But there's a third film that enters the chat here, also directed by Senate. That's right. Senate directed another short called The Ragtime Band, And it's a little hazy here, but it seems like he got the idea to have characters throw baked goods at each other from the story of the shoot that we don't have a print of anymore, from a Noise from the Deep where Mabel Norman, you know, through that pie at Fatty r. Buckle. So this is like kind of like this weird, you know, echo chamber of Hollywood lore. But it seems like that's it may have also been just another story of that happening in real life that she was like irritated at. Ben Turpin, the actor who played Mr. Flip himself, What do you think, Ben, Yeah, it's it's interesting. But regardless of which of those three narratives is accurate, we know that pie throwing blew up in a big way around that time. Somewhere between nineteen o nine and nineteen thirteen, and after that it was everywhere. Charlie Chaplin threw pies in nineteen sixteens behind the screen. This became a comedy trope, the epitome of a comedy trope. And shout out to our friend Rowan, who made some appearances on her earlier series Idiomatic for the People when he came up with a race I just love, he said, support the tropes. Indeed, thank you for your Yes, you've done us, You've done us. Proud yes. And so after this, for over a century this was a common occurrence in slapstick comedies. And this is thanks in part to Max Senate and Keystone Studios. Keystone Studios was started by Senate back in nineteen twelve, and the studio was often called a comedy pioneer. They had a huge hand and making pie throwing ubiquitous. They did and bent. Do you remember that one time when you and me and our buddy Alex Williams, who composed our theme, were in Los Angeles and we were walking down We had gone to like an awards thing, and we were all kind of suited up a little bit and we were walking down Hollywood Boulevard like more in the Las Vilas portion, and somebody yelled Keystone cops at us. Yes, I was accused of being a cop no less than three times that, which was funny because as by the end of that night, I was in my cups and would not have been a good representation of law. Candidly, none of us would have been a good representation, no question about it, but I did not. That is such an l a thing to yell. Because the Keystone Cops were a famous kind of comedy bit. I guess that Keystone Studios put out so much that that kind of became. It almost seems to me, I haven't seen this bit, but it sounds to me like a little bit of a proto the Benny Hill thing, where it's like, you know, sped up kind of cops chasing around people and like fallen down and looking like idiots. Yeah, that's always mentioned, the Benny Hill montage. It works in a couple of different ways here because it depicts chaos, right, you want comedic scenes to escalate their steaks and become chaotic, find the comedy in the chaos or unexpected connections. But then also from a very structural standpoint, it's a great way to wrap stuff up. The studio itself used this bit so often that they became publicly owned for pie tossing, and the studio eventually they this is how often they used this idea of food fights, of throwing pies. Especially Eventually, Keystone Studios needed its own bakery just to make prop baked goods, and they were trying to figure out how they could get a good pie connect They found the answer literally across the street from the studio. There was a business owner named Sarah Brenner showed a variety store at this location, but she also was the pie person. She was the pie plug for the studio. And uh, it's funny because sometimes when they were pies that were made to be eaten, they were actually pretty good. Charlie Chaplin called him the best pies in town. But the thing is, if you know anything about food as it's depicted on film, even in the modern day, a lot of the stuff that looks delicious on screen is not stuff you would want to eat. In fact, a lot of times it's not even food. It's not even edible, or it has like you know, like I know that I've have been friends with a few people who are food photographers, and they put like clear nail polish on things sometimes to make it like shine like for example, a pie even probably could be or like a burger bun, you know, like in a McDonald's dad, where it just looks so shiny and perfect. The light hits it and that kind of glints. That's because there's some sort of like noxious you know, solvent of some kind painted onto the outside of it. But this was true for prop pies as well, because you needed, you know, not just any pie would do. It needed to be weighted in a certain way. It needed to pop for the color, for the black and white like we were talking about, and it also needed to explode like a blood squib, you know, when it hit its target. The ones that Keystone ended up using pretty often were especially made to be more ballistic heavy duty pastry in Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson, the author describes them as you seeing a quote, especially slurpy custard, which sounds gross, but it's show business, right, And there's a recent custard pies where used so much more often. They're super messy, and most importantly, they don't have a top crust, meaning that you'll get more of a splat factor and it'll be less potentially dangerous for your actors. Right. Think about like if you had like a true lattice worked like cherry pie or something like that, you know, it would hit you in the face and the impact would be absorbed by that like lattice top crust rather than like maximum splattery impact. So this was very thoughtful and Fatty R. Buckle and Buster Keaton, who was his protege, definitely know him from physical comedy stuff. You know, the idea of like that set piece barn door kind of falling down. He's the lands right in the window. You know, very very physical, dangerous at times comedy stunts that Buster Keaton would do. But he learned everything he knew from Fatty R. Buckle, and between the two of them they sort of furthered this formula left for how to have the perfect pie impact for the camera and for maximum laughs. Yes, you could call it high impact. He could call it hi pie impact, just pie impact, pen impact. I'm over I'm overthinking this. I'm all the way there with you, Ben. And this was in nineteen seventeen where these dudes took pie throwing to the next level in a film called The Butcher Boy. That was actually Keaton's first on screen appearance. Yeah, you see the food fighting roots here. Artbuckle didn't go with a pie for this when he went with a bag of flower, and he wanted to make sure that he caught Keaton absolutely by surprise, so he said, Okay, don't look at this bag of flower coming. I don't want you to flinch. Just don't look and turn around when you hear me yell now. Keaton turned around here Arbuckle, yell now, and turn around just in time to get knocked on the floor by this bag of flower. And so they probably rethought throwing just bags of flower people and said, okay, maybe pies because you can will stand up. Yeah, And it's basically, you know, it's flower. This is a raw material experiment. And they realized, oh, maybe, like the weight and half of a giant bag of flower hitting somebody in the face is a little much. I'm sure it was hilarious, but Keaton said in his memoir that he absolutely got knocked on his backside when he was hit by this thing. He said, he put my head where my feet were. That's what that means. I mean he knocked him on his Keister, on his buster Keister. And so they had also, over time working with pies in this comedic way, they had become increasingly sophisticated in the construction of these stunt pies. What the the they even detail it. Author Mary and Meade talks about this recipe that Keaton came up with. First, they cooked two crust, one inside the other until they're quite brittle, because a double crust will prevent crumbling when you're throwing the pie. And then secondly, you never used a tin plate that could cut somebody in the face or the eye, right, And they said, this happens because the once the plate hits, it slides sideways at the moment of impact, which is part of the gag, right. I mean, you know, we'll get to it later, but like I always think of the Loony Tunes kind of completely exaggerated version of that, where the pie hits and it just slow most slides off, leaving all the good behind right exactly exactly. And they had specific recipes which I found pretty interesting. So after they've got this crust and they say no tin plates, they're gonna fill it with an inch of flour and water paste. That's very thick, and then the rest of the recipe varies on the person's appearance. I love this so much. It gets so specific. They talk about if a man in a suit, a light colored suit, was to be the target, then they would add chocolate or strawberry to add, you know, something that would completely wreck their clothes and make it really clear that they had been hit with something, and that black and white. If a blonde was going to be hit, then custard would not be used. Instead, it was a mixture of blackberries, flour, and water topped with whipped cream, which is that classic like double dare. And those were just literally pie plates, you know, with whip cream, like in Revenge of the Nerds where they're giving away pies that just have naked pictures on the bottom of the plate, right, they're just whipped cream over the pictures. Yeah, that's that's the most basic version of a thing that you maybe could call it pie. But this is so fascinating. Brunette's even had their own category of pie. I love the idea of ballistic pie that would be a lemon meringue filling um to contrast with their darker hair. And Keaton even had really specific recommendations on how to go about throwing it, like how to you know, surprise your victim to get like the maximum you know, genuine reaction. The shot put, the shot put. That's right. He refers to several kind of techniques of throwing pies, and he says this in his memoir This is the Custard Pie Surprise. I was about to heave its sweet faced Alice Faye in their film Hollywood Cavalcade, which came out in nine. I worried about her flinching. Besides spoiling the shot, that would mean and this I love is it's so perfectly functional. This would mean hours of delay while Alice took a shower, got a whole new makeup job of hair do, and was fitted for a duplicate close outfit. That makes sense. That would have taken forever to reset that. It's like a very small scale version of like doing some sort of pyro event on a movie set where you like blow up a bank or something. And so we can already see that there's a lot of work going into the comedy pie business. But when we return for part two of our episode, we're gonna see that this goes even further. It leads to something called the Battle of the Century, which is the epic pie fight to end all pie fights. What are we talking about. You'll have to tune in for part two. And please, by the way, just to be safe. We know, we explain how to make various kinds of movie pies for throwing at people. But please don't take that as us say you should throw a pie at an unwilling person. No, you have to have pie approval before. I mean, unless, like you're working in comedy and it's understood that you know, by entering into this there is the potential that you might get here with a pie or a double dare situation. That's something that you kind of like sign up for when you get one of that set. Yeah, consensual pie fights also as well learn in part two there's a little bit of what you might call pie throwing ethics. People like Buster Keaton thought that not everyone should get a pie thrown at them. We'll tell you more about this in the second part of our series on the history of pie throwing. In the meantime, you know, I've been dying to ask this whole episode, doll fellow ridiculous historians, have you ever been in a pie fight or a food fight. What happened? How to go down? Did you ever? Just? I feel like we have at least one person the audience who just slammed a pie in their own face. That'd be fun. There is a game, like a kid's game that you can get that involve these like spring loaded hands that like shoot pies in your face, but they really are just tiny little piethons that I believe. You have to supply your own whip cream. It never seemed like a very good bargain to me as a game, like think of all the think of the whip cream costs that would go into playing this game. Yeah, you've got to think of the R O I or R O pie I should say, Max, Uh, if you put a wall PLoP in there, I'm not gonna be mad at you. Thanks as always to our super producer Casey Begraham, our producers Andrew Howard and Max Williams, and Uh you can't help the shout out. The man himself, Alex Williams composed this slapping track. As we mentioned earlier. He did indeed one of our Keystone Cop brethren. If you want to check us out on the internet, you can do so ridiculous history. We're pretty much all the places that would lead you to. You can also find Ben and I as individual human people. I am on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown. You can also find me on Twitter at Ben Bulling h s W, where you can get a sneak peek at some of the stuff I'm working on. You can also drop by Instagram where I'm at Ben Bolan bo w l I n okay. We already think Alex Williams, who composed our theme twice. Even gosh, we're on a roll. Gabe Lucier, our research associate extraordinaire. Christopher hasciotes here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the Quister, may ever mayhe rain. If one man that I know deserves a pie in the face, it's Jonathan Strickland's a k the Twister. Jonathan. If you're listening, I want you to know that the future hurdles toward you unstoppable. Even now, there is a pie, the pieces of a pie coming together, aimed for your face. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super producer Casey Pagrib, Shout out to our guest producers Max William Andrew Howard. Let's welcome them all within inaugural pie in the face. That's how he hates people here on Ridiculous History. I've been I have been in a pie fight, have you know? I have not been, but this news of this inaugural hazing situation as news to me. I've never ever gotten a pie in the face. Ben. It sounds really unpleasant and messy and sticky. It's it's fun. I've I've done it mainly under the auspices of sketch comedy, so I knew the pie was coming, and I think that's a key factor in how one receives a pie to the face. It definitely is been. You know, my first exposure to pies in the face was probably on Nickelodeon shows like Doubledare, and you can't do that on television and stuff, and obviously by that point it's such a cliche. Amazingly for for the right reasons, cliche thing in comedy and to see them kind of like revive it, you know for a younger audience, is that it's it's inspiring. Ben, after doing the research for this episode, Yeah, yeah, it's one of those legendary physical comedy or slapstick tropes up there with slipping on a banana peel, which is much more difficult than it looks. I don't want to go into the nuts and bolts of why I tried to figure that out. But even if you are one of those are people who says I don't really like comedy, your says that I don't know someone, some imaginary person who is just all set to have a really wholesome change of heart, hopefully maybe in this episode. Uh, this is the thing. Pie throwing is going to be familiar with anybody, even if you don't consider yourself a fan of comedy or slapstick comedy specifically. And when you look into it like we did along with Gabe, our research associate, what you'll find is that it has a very, very surprisingly long history, so much so that our history of the pie in the face gag is going to be a two parter. We couldn't fit all of it in one episode. Could we know? We couldn't. And this is the rare but increasingly less rare, proactive two parter, So here we are, So Here we are, Here we Are. It's funny if you think about why slapstick had such a day in the sun for so long, what you learn is that it since to you slapstick comedy during the era of silent film silent moving pictures, because you know, it was way easier to show a joke to the audience than tell them about it. And you know, that's still sort of like an important ethos in filmmaking. They always say show don't tell. That's why, like voiceover narration is considered kind of a hackneyed and cliche technique. I'm looking at you, Ridley Scott with Blade Runner original cut, But then I think he made up for it in the director's cut. But it's true and and it's not only because of the show don't tell idea, because there literally was no sound with which to tell the contrast and the way you know, early film and early comedy was was shot was such that a pie had a perfect level of color to make it pop in the frame. Yeah, that's a good point there. And it's also true that this phenomenon does not originate with silent film. It goes back to the days of the vaudeville circuit. That's where we first see documented purposeful cases of tossing a pie at someone's face for a laugh, and it was always extra funny to the vaudeville audience if the victim was real posh and real fancy. Seeing someone dressed as a hobo get hit with a pie is not as subversive as seeing, you know, someone dressed as the Duke of um Earl on water, but getting hit with totally. It's because inherently, you know, kind of lowers your guard or cuts you down to size, you know, if you're some kind of high salutant swell and then like the humble tramp hits you in the face with a pie. It's a way of kind of like normalizing everyone, and like it's like allowing you to kind of laugh at yourself or be really grumpy and you know, stamp away and a huff. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also there's some good comedic theory that goes into this as well. It's part of a larger structure, you could say, of the ideas of good narrative storytelling, which is there must be a status switch. It's interesting for the audience of one of low status, you know, goes from poper to prints, if someone of high status goes in the opposite direction, and a pie fight is a very quick way to do that. It's also a beautiful way to end a story that doesn't really have an ending, right. A lot of silent films above little bits are just kind of here is an anthology of things that we think are funny. How do we end it? That's right, And in the earliest days of it, back in the pre filmed days, it was definitely used as a device to like break up a sketch or you know, kind of change gears right, because it's sort of like, is this event that then everyone has to remark upon, and then it gives you almost this like like a sleight of hand ability to kind of change course and then have people like focus on one thing and then now they're looking at the new scene that's kind of formed around it. Yeah, it's got some of the similar vibes to the famous Benny Hill Chase montages. They're like, let's just make it as Steve Massa described absurd, antarctic, and funny. That's him speaking about the cream pie fight as a visual non sequitur in an excellent New York Times article called comedy Sweet Weapon the cream Pie, But Noel. When we are looking at the history of the pie fights or the pie in the face, if we are looking to the world of film, it seems like opinions differ on which silent film had the quote first pie fight. We've got like three different opinions here, and now it's borderline controversial. Band. Do you think it's okay for us to wade into these waters? I think, you know what, I think we can throw a pie or two of conversation here and maybe we can talk. Maybe after we go through the first three, we can figure out which one we think is more likely. What I am completely with you. So one of the first examples comes from Gilbert M. Bronco Billy Anderson's film Mr. Flip, which came out nineteen o nine. I'm not gonna lie. I had to go off Mike for a second, be like, was there really there was film in nineteen o nine. I feel like I'm obviously not a Hollywood historian, but the stuff absolutely fascinates me, and it follows it's sort of like, you know, I mean, it's this guy's kind of a hell. He's this abusive store manager, like of a general store in a town, played by Ben Turpin, and that's Mr Flip And he gets a pie to the face as is not fine why I'm laughing after sexually harassing every single woman that he encounters. That's sort of his thing. That's he's a hell. But again, that device, that cream pie allows some sort of like visual representation of him being cut down to size and uh, kind of getting his retribution for all of that, you know, awful hellish behavior. Yes. Also nineteen o nine, that's the year that newspaper reporting of the Jersey Devil the cryptod exploded. That has nothing to do with today's episode. I'm just kind of on an info dump getting rid of all these things I learned full disclosure exactly has something to do with what we talked about earlier today. It all kind of bleeds together. What are we talking about history or cryptids? It's it's all kind of, you know, two sides of the same coin. Here's something I also didn't know. Mabel Norman, who is one of the great woman comedians of all time comedians, and I always like to say that, but who knows that that's even appropriate. She was called often by the press the female chaplain, which seems dismissive, but you know, it was the It was the nineteen tense. And she in a nineteen thirteen comedy called A Noise from the Deep directed by Max Sennett, she throws a pie on film at Fatty r Buckle. Max Sennet, the director also known as the quote father of slapstick comedy. So those are two of our big contenders for first pie throne. But unfortunately you can't see a copy of A Noise from the Deep today. No princes of the film are known to exist, and so the pie in question has become a little bit of a passion project. Intrepid entertainment historians and the right right and a lot of them rely on help from early descriptions of the scene at the time by people who were able to watch the film, including the author Andy Edmonds. That's right. Andy Edmonds wrote a book on Fatty Arbuckle called Frame Up, and she recounts kind of in the oral tradition, this event that may or may not have happened exactly like that, and I love everything about this. So apparently the crew of the shoot, we're looking for some way, like we said, to break up a comedy sequence, and there was some you know, I have craft services, I guess. There was a pile of pastries on a nearby craft services tray or table, and Fatty or Roscoe, as his mother called him, um saw an opportunity here for comedy gold. And he grabbed one of these pies and he called Mabel over and handed it to her and instructed her to throw the pie in his Yeah, and Senate the director couldn't hear what they were saying, and our Buckle wouldn't tell him. It was probably like, I don't want to lose the magic. Just trust me, bro, just roll the cameras. So he said, okay, I trust you. He let the cameras roll, and he used a wide angle, and then at some point in the scene, Mabel took a pie, reared back, and then flu popped it into our Buckle's face. Everybody cracked up while filming it, which is a good sign audiences felt the same way, and this became part of the primary foundation of film slapstick, and then from there, you would see a pie throwing scene in all sorts of comedies, both by Senate because he was not above using the same gag multiple times, and by his competitors and his rivals. But there's a third film that enters the chat here, also directed by Senate. That's right. Senate directed another short called The Ragtime Band, And it's a little hazy here, but it seems like he got the idea to have characters throw baked goods at each other from the story of the shoot that we don't have a print of anymore, from a Noise from the Deep where Mabel Norman, you know, through that pie at Fatty r. Buckle. So this is like kind of like this weird, you know, echo chamber of Hollywood lore. But it seems like that's it may have also been just another story of that happening in real life that she was like irritated at. Ben Turpin, the actor who played Mr. Flip himself, What do you think, Ben, Yeah, it's it's interesting. But regardless of which of those three narratives is accurate, we know that pie throwing blew up in a big way around that time. Somewhere between nineteen o nine and nineteen thirteen, and after that it was everywhere. Charlie Chaplin threw pies in nineteen sixteens behind the screen. This became a comedy trope, the epitome of a comedy trope. And shout out to our friend Rowan, who made some appearances on her earlier series Idiomatic for the People when he came up with a race I just love, he said, support the tropes. Indeed, thank you for your Yes, you've done us, You've done us. Proud yes. And so after this, for over a century this was a common occurrence in slapstick comedies. And this is thanks in part to Max Senate and Keystone Studios. Keystone Studios was started by Senate back in nineteen twelve, and the studio was often called a comedy pioneer. They had a huge hand and making pie throwing ubiquitous. They did and bent. Do you remember that one time when you and me and our buddy Alex Williams, who composed our theme, were in Los Angeles and we were walking down We had gone to like an awards thing, and we were all kind of suited up a little bit and we were walking down Hollywood Boulevard like more in the Las Vilas portion, and somebody yelled Keystone cops at us. Yes, I was accused of being a cop no less than three times that, which was funny because as by the end of that night, I was in my cups and would not have been a good representation of law. Candidly, none of us would have been a good representation, no question about it, but I did not. That is such an l a thing to yell. Because the Keystone Cops were a famous kind of comedy bit. I guess that Keystone Studios put out so much that that kind of became. It almost seems to me, I haven't seen this bit, but it sounds to me like a little bit of a proto the Benny Hill thing, where it's like, you know, sped up kind of cops chasing around people and like fallen down and looking like idiots. Yeah, that's always mentioned, the Benny Hill montage. It works in a couple of different ways here because it depicts chaos, right, you want comedic scenes to escalate their steaks and become chaotic, find the comedy in the chaos or unexpected connections. But then also from a very structural standpoint, it's a great way to wrap stuff up. The studio itself used this bit so often that they became publicly owned for pie tossing, and the studio eventually they this is how often they used this idea of food fights, of throwing pies. Especially Eventually, Keystone Studios needed its own bakery just to make prop baked goods, and they were trying to figure out how they could get a good pie connect They found the answer literally across the street from the studio. There was a business owner named Sarah Brenner showed a variety store at this location, but she also was the pie person. She was the pie plug for the studio. And uh, it's funny because sometimes when they were pies that were made to be eaten, they were actually pretty good. Charlie Chaplin called him the best pies in town. But the thing is, if you know anything about food as it's depicted on film, even in the modern day, a lot of the stuff that looks delicious on screen is not stuff you would want to eat. In fact, a lot of times it's not even food. It's not even edible, or it has like you know, like I know that I've have been friends with a few people who are food photographers, and they put like clear nail polish on things sometimes to make it like shine like for example, a pie even probably could be or like a burger bun, you know, like in a McDonald's dad, where it just looks so shiny and perfect. The light hits it and that kind of glints. That's because there's some sort of like noxious you know, solvent of some kind painted onto the outside of it. But this was true for prop pies as well, because you needed, you know, not just any pie would do. It needed to be weighted in a certain way. It needed to pop for the color, for the black and white like we were talking about, and it also needed to explode like a blood squib, you know, when it hit its target. The ones that Keystone ended up using pretty often were especially made to be more ballistic heavy duty pastry in Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson, the author describes them as you seeing a quote, especially slurpy custard, which sounds gross, but it's show business, right, And there's a recent custard pies where used so much more often. They're super messy, and most importantly, they don't have a top crust, meaning that you'll get more of a splat factor and it'll be less potentially dangerous for your actors. Right. Think about like if you had like a true lattice worked like cherry pie or something like that, you know, it would hit you in the face and the impact would be absorbed by that like lattice top crust rather than like maximum splattery impact. So this was very thoughtful and Fatty R. Buckle and Buster Keaton, who was his protege, definitely know him from physical comedy stuff. You know, the idea of like that set piece barn door kind of falling down. He's the lands right in the window. You know, very very physical, dangerous at times comedy stunts that Buster Keaton would do. But he learned everything he knew from Fatty R. Buckle, and between the two of them they sort of furthered this formula left for how to have the perfect pie impact for the camera and for maximum laughs. Yes, you could call it high impact. He could call it hi pie impact, just pie impact, pen impact. I'm over I'm overthinking this. I'm all the way there with you, Ben. And this was in nineteen seventeen where these dudes took pie throwing to the next level in a film called The Butcher Boy. That was actually Keaton's first on screen appearance. Yeah, you see the food fighting roots here. Artbuckle didn't go with a pie for this when he went with a bag of flower, and he wanted to make sure that he caught Keaton absolutely by surprise, so he said, Okay, don't look at this bag of flower coming. I don't want you to flinch. Just don't look and turn around when you hear me yell now. Keaton turned around here Arbuckle, yell now, and turn around just in time to get knocked on the floor by this bag of flower. And so they probably rethought throwing just bags of flower people and said, okay, maybe pies because you can will stand up. Yeah, And it's basically, you know, it's flower. This is a raw material experiment. And they realized, oh, maybe, like the weight and half of a giant bag of flower hitting somebody in the face is a little much. I'm sure it was hilarious, but Keaton said in his memoir that he absolutely got knocked on his backside when he was hit by this thing. He said, he put my head where my feet were. That's what that means. I mean he knocked him on his Keister, on his buster Keister. And so they had also, over time working with pies in this comedic way, they had become increasingly sophisticated in the construction of these stunt pies. What the the they even detail it. Author Mary and Meade talks about this recipe that Keaton came up with. First, they cooked two crust, one inside the other until they're quite brittle, because a double crust will prevent crumbling when you're throwing the pie. And then secondly, you never used a tin plate that could cut somebody in the face or the eye, right, And they said, this happens because the once the plate hits, it slides sideways at the moment of impact, which is part of the gag, right. I mean, you know, we'll get to it later, but like I always think of the Loony Tunes kind of completely exaggerated version of that, where the pie hits and it just slow most slides off, leaving all the good behind right exactly exactly. And they had specific recipes which I found pretty interesting. So after they've got this crust and they say no tin plates, they're gonna fill it with an inch of flour and water paste. That's very thick, and then the rest of the recipe varies on the person's appearance. I love this so much. It gets so specific. They talk about if a man in a suit, a light colored suit, was to be the target, then they would add chocolate or strawberry to add, you know, something that would completely wreck their clothes and make it really clear that they had been hit with something, and that black and white. If a blonde was going to be hit, then custard would not be used. Instead, it was a mixture of blackberries, flour, and water topped with whipped cream, which is that classic like double dare. And those were just literally pie plates, you know, with whip cream, like in Revenge of the Nerds where they're giving away pies that just have naked pictures on the bottom of the plate, right, they're just whipped cream over the pictures. Yeah, that's that's the most basic version of a thing that you maybe could call it pie. But this is so fascinating. Brunette's even had their own category of pie. I love the idea of ballistic pie that would be a lemon meringue filling um to contrast with their darker hair. And Keaton even had really specific recommendations on how to go about throwing it, like how to you know, surprise your victim to get like the maximum you know, genuine reaction. The shot put, the shot put. That's right. He refers to several kind of techniques of throwing pies, and he says this in his memoir This is the Custard Pie Surprise. I was about to heave its sweet faced Alice Faye in their film Hollywood Cavalcade, which came out in nine. I worried about her flinching. Besides spoiling the shot, that would mean and this I love is it's so perfectly functional. This would mean hours of delay while Alice took a shower, got a whole new makeup job of hair do, and was fitted for a duplicate close outfit. That makes sense. That would have taken forever to reset that. It's like a very small scale version of like doing some sort of pyro event on a movie set where you like blow up a bank or something. And so we can already see that there's a lot of work going into the comedy pie business. But when we return for part two of our episode, we're gonna see that this goes even further. It leads to something called the Battle of the Century, which is the epic pie fight to end all pie fights. What are we talking about. You'll have to tune in for part two. And please, by the way, just to be safe. We know, we explain how to make various kinds of movie pies for throwing at people. But please don't take that as us say you should throw a pie at an unwilling person. No, you have to have pie approval before. I mean, unless, like you're working in comedy and it's understood that you know, by entering into this there is the potential that you might get here with a pie or a double dare situation. That's something that you kind of like sign up for when you get one of that set. Yeah, consensual pie fights also as well learn in part two there's a little bit of what you might call pie throwing ethics. People like Buster Keaton thought that not everyone should get a pie thrown at them. We'll tell you more about this in the second part of our series on the history of pie throwing. In the meantime, you know, I've been dying to ask this whole episode, doll fellow ridiculous historians, have you ever been in a pie fight or a food fight. What happened? How to go down? Did you ever? Just? I feel like we have at least one person the audience who just slammed a pie in their own face. That'd be fun. There is a game, like a kid's game that you can get that involve these like spring loaded hands that like shoot pies in your face, but they really are just tiny little piethons that I believe. You have to supply your own whip cream. It never seemed like a very good bargain to me as a game, like think of all the think of the whip cream costs that would go into playing this game. Yeah, you've got to think of the R O I or R O pie I should say, Max, Uh, if you put a wall PLoP in there, I'm not gonna be mad at you. Thanks as always to our super producer Casey Begraham, our producers Andrew Howard and Max Williams, and Uh you can't help the shout out. The man himself, Alex Williams composed this slapping track. As we mentioned earlier. He did indeed one of our Keystone Cop brethren. If you want to check us out on the internet, you can do so ridiculous history. We're pretty much all the places that would lead you to. You can also find Ben and I as individual human people. I am on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown. You can also find me on Twitter at Ben Bulling h s W, where you can get a sneak peek at some of the stuff I'm working on. You can also drop by Instagram where I'm at Ben Bolan bo w l I n okay. We already think Alex Williams, who composed our theme twice. Even gosh, we're on a roll. Gabe Lucier, our research associate extraordinaire. Christopher hasciotes here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the Quister, may ever mayhe rain. If one man that I know deserves a pie in the face, it's Jonathan Strickland's a k the Twister. Jonathan. If you're listening, I want you to know that the future hurdles toward you unstoppable. Even now, there is a pie, the pieces of a pie coming together, aimed for your face. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.