The Fine Art of Pie Throwing: The Classic Gag's Television History

Being from Detroit, my friends and I (now all a bit long in the dentures) were reared on the fine art of pie throwing as primarily practiced by the Three Stooges and our very own local television hero, Soupy Sales.

When Soupy's show moved from Detroit to Los Angeles and a national audience, it gained such popularity that it became trendy for superstar celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tony Curtis to get pie-ed on Soupy's show. For Detroit fans especially, this fame only spoiled the impact of the joke.

On the day I turned thirty in Los Angeles, my old friends flew in from Detroit and other parts of the country just to ambush me with a coconut cream pie at a "romantic" birthday dinner with a girlfriend. This entire event was photographically documented in rapid sequence from set-up to pie-faced delivery to pissed reaction. Years later, I got back at the chief plotter, pie-ing him at his ultra-posh third wedding.

I must admit, though, I've always had mixed feelings when the slapstick factor of pie-ing faded and became more a political tactic in the seventies. Coincidentally, the first official incident of political pie-ing occurred in Detroit in 1972, when a Yippie (a more political variety of hippie) smashed a shaving cream pie in the face of the Guru Maharaji, one of the icons of the emerging New Age movement of that time. A side note: The "pie thrower" was later attacked with a hammer by an overzealous follower of the Guru.

In the seventies and early eighties, Aron Kay was known as the Pie Man. His specialty was pie-ing high profile political figures including ex-CIA chief William Colby, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York City Mayor Abe Beame, and homophobe former Miss America Anita Bryant.

Belgian Noel Godin took up Kay's Pie Man title in the eighties and nineties, pie-ing the likes of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (he got pegged with three fruit pies) and Microsoft chairman and the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. A side note: it took 32 people to help Godin engineer the Gates pie-ing. Godin's group is known as the Biotic Baking Brigade.