Pieing is the act of throwing a pie at a person or persons. This can be a political action when the target is an authority figure, politician, or celebrity and can be used as a means of protesting against the target's political beliefs, or against perceived arrogance or vanity. Perpetrators generally regard the act as a form of ridicule to embarrass and humiliate the victim. In some U.S. states pieing may conform to definitions of the crime of battery, but not assault.
Pieing and pie fights are a staple of slapstick comedy, and pie "tosses" are also common charity fundraising events, especially in schools.
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Pieing has its origins in the "pie in the face" gag from slapstick comedy, first seen in the 1909 Essanay Studios silent film Mr. Flip starring Ben Turpin.[1] In the story, Turpin has a pie pushed into his face for taking liberties with a woman.
Beginning in 1913 with That Ragtime Band and A Noise from the Deep, filmmaker Mack Sennett became known for using one or two thrown pies in many of his comedy shorts. Sennett had a personal rule about who received the pies: "A mother never gets hit with a custard pie ... Mothers-in-law, yes. But mothers? Never."[2]
At least a half dozen films have been made incorporating extended pie-throwing battles. The first was Charlie Chaplin's Behind the Screen released in 1916. The definitive pie fight film is The Battle of the Century (1927) starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, using 3,000 pies. Our Gang's Shivering Shakespeare (1930) winds up with an auditorium full of people throwing pies. The 1935 short subject called Keystone Hotel featured a large pie fight ending with the camera taking a pie. In 1941, another major pie fight film appeared: The Three Stooges' In the Sweet Pie and Pie.[3][4][5] A Technicolor film involving pies was the 1965 comedy, The Great Race; known for having the largest pie fight in cinematic history.[6] Its $200,000 pie fight scene used one large cake and 4,000 pies, and took five days to shoot.[7]
There are many instances in the Looney Tunes series of cartoons where characters "pie" each other in the face. Bugs Bunny repeatedly hits Elmer Fudd with cream pies during a scene in Slick Hare. In Shishkabugs, Bugs Bunny releases a spring-loaded pie into the face of the king, causing the royal cook Yosemite Sam to be led away to a dungeon. The episode Daffy Dilly has Daffy Duck trying to cure a dying millionaire by getting him to laugh. After he achieves this inadvertently, by landing in a cake, Daffy is hired as a sort of household jester and ends the cartoon by getting repeatedly pelted with cakes and pies.[8]
In one of the Batman comic books, The Joker once concocted an elaborate scheme whose sole purpose was to hit Batman in the face with a pie.[8]
Many comedy routines have used a pie as a gag, including ones performed by Soupy Sales and Monty Python.
Alison Sweeney was pied on the show Days of Our Lives.[9]
Brett Favre was pied at the 1999 Fox Kids Bowl along with Jerome Bettis.[10]
Chip Ganassi Racing driver Dan Wheldon threw a pie at teammate Scott Dixon in celebrating the 2008 Izod IndyCar Series Championship.
The probable originator of pieing as a political act was Thomas King Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine. In 1970, Forcade pied Otto N. Larsen, the Chairman of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; his action was called the first Yippie pieing.[11][12] Aron Kay, also a Yippie, went on to take up Forcade's pieing tactics. Kay pied, among many others, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol.[13] A disciple of Aron Kay, Thom Higgins, pied singer and anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1977 (audio footage of the incident is included in the Chumbawamba song Just Desserts, a homage to the concept of pieing).[14][15][16] Kay retired in 1992 after pieing right-wing activist Randall Terry. Kay appears in cartoon form in a 2003 animated music video, "Death penalty for pot" by Benedict Arnold and The Traitors, where he and Dana Beal pie George W. Bush and former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (at 2 minutes and 33 seconds into the video).[17]
Concerning Kay, an article in the San Francisco Examiner says: "He considers the Three Stooges, whom he began watching on TV as a kid, as the true fathers of pie-throwing."[4]
Recently, the Belgian anarchist and surrealist Noël Godin has gained a following for pieing figures whom he believes take themselves too seriously, such as filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard during the Cannes Film Festival. His favorite target was Bernard-Henri Lévy. Godin stated that the men he most desired to pie were Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Pope John Paul II. Godin's popularity has inspired many copycats.
A noted victim of pieing was Microsoft founder Bill Gates who was pied in Belgium in 1998. A computer game was later released in which Gates' head pops up around the screen and the object is to "pie" as many of his heads as possible in the allocated time.
The anonymous Biotic Baking Brigade has pied or attempted to pie, among others, conservative pundits Ann Coulter and David Horowitz; and Fred Phelps, the controversial leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. Coulter has also been attacked by the "terrorist" group Al Pieda.[18] The Canadian group the Entartistes, founded by Rhinoceros Party of Canada founder François Gourd, has also pied many, including then-Prime Minister of Canada Jean Chrétien. In 2003 in the city of Calgary they pied Ralph Klein, the premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, saying in their press release: "Is it surprising to see Ralph Klein opposing the Kyoto Accord for the right of big corporations to pollute, the same corporations that finance his campaigns?"[3]
"The pie gives power back to the people because so many feel powerless in the face of big politicians and industrialists", explained Pope-Tart (a pseudonym), a member of the Entartistes.[19] Newsweek columnist Gersh Kuntzman wrote that pieing "deserves to be one of the most celebrated traditions in our so-called culture."[16]
Sometimes pieing targets suffer the prank with good humor. Godard was very pleased at being pied; he intervened with the Cannes authorities on behalf of Noël Godin to prevent him from being arrested. Anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant, upon being pied by a gay activist on television, joked that "at least it's a fruit pie", apparently making a pun on the derogatory term for a gay man ("fruit"). However, moments later she was in tears. By contrast, Bernard-Henri Lévy has on multiple occasions attacked Godin and his followers, and Ann Coulter pressed charges in 2005 when she narrowly evaded a pie at the University of Arizona.[20] Activist David Horowitz said of his pieing, "These attacks are sinister. The person who throws a pie is saying, ‘I hate you. I don't want you to speak.' I never saw it coming. And it took away my dignity. When you're lecturing, you're supposed to have an authority. But a pie turns it into a food fight."[16]
On January 25, 2010, Canada's Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea was hit with a pie in her face while touring the Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ont, in an act of protest against the seal hunt in Canada by animal rights group PETA.[21] PETA said in a release that it was part of its campaign “to stop the government’s ill-advised sanction of the slaughter of seals.”[22]
On July 19, 2011, Rupert Murdoch was pied in London during a Parliamentary hearing on the News International phone hacking scandal.[23][15][24][25][26][27]
When former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien was hit in the face with a pie by a protester in Prince Edward Island in 2000. His attacker initially was given jail time but eventually received a conditional sentence.[22]
A woman who missed Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach with a pie at the annual Calgary Stampede breakfast in 2007, and hit a security official instead, was sentenced to 30 days in jail. So was a woman who threw a pie at Calgary Mayor Dave Bronconnier in the summer of 2007.[22]
In 2003, a protester who hit then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein in the face with a pie at the Stampede breakfast was convicted of assault and ordered to serve a 30-day intermittent jail sentence.[22]
Jonathan May-Bowles pied Rupert Murdoch in July 2011 during a highly publicized testimony before a British parliamentary committee in connection with the News International phone hacking scandal. May-Bowles was sentenced to serve a six-week prison sentence at Wandsworth Prison in London; this sentence has subsequently been reduced to four weeks. The Murdoch media empire remains under fire as investigators continue to probe reports of other phone hacking.[28]
In August 2010, a Michigan State University student named Ahlam Mohsem, 23, threw a Dutch apple pie into Michigan Senator Carl Levin's face and was arrested on assault and battery charges. The police also charged a man who allegedly distracted the senator before the pie was thrown. Mohsem said she threw the pie to protest the Senator's support for war crimes by Israel.[29]
At charity fund raisers, a pie-toss event usually involves some well-known figure, generally a person either in a position of authority or fame, who is intended as the "victim". People attending the event pay for or bid on the opportunity to smoosh the volunteer victim in the face with a custard pie; throwing is generally not allowed anymore as the impact can cause injury, and the smoosh is usually in slow-motion and applied without great pressure. Although this takes the element of chance out of the event, it allows the opportunity to smear pie more thoroughly in the victim's face and potentially through their hair. This is a popular fund-raising event with schools and social or charitable organizations. Students can pie teachers, professors, or other administrators to ease the tension while still raising money and/or awareness about a cause.
The pie in question can include a variety of messy substances, usually whipped cream, custard, non-dairy dessert topping or simply shaving foam, placed in a pie tin or sometimes simply piled onto a paper plate.
One additional option is allowing the person who has purchased or won the opportunity to use the pie to also fill it, usually with a variety of extremely messy dessert toppings: chocolate, cherries, caramel sauce, strawberry sauce, etc. Plastic bags for the victim to protect their clothing and hair are optional. Witnesses standing too close to the victim(s) may be splattered.
In Major League Baseball, New York Yankees pitcher A. J. Burnett pies teammates who drive in or score the winning run in a walk-off win (a game won on a hit by the last batter).[31][32]
Burnett's "pies" are filled with either shaving cream or whipped cream. Burnett has pied Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Damon, Melky Cabrera, Jorge Posada, Hideki Matsui, Nick Swisher, (twice) Robinson Canó (twice), Francisco Cervelli,[33] Juan Miranda, Mark Teixeira, Jerry Hairston, Jr., and most recently Marcus Thames. Burnett usually pies the player while he is being interviewed on the field by a TV reporter.
The pieing tradition in baseball has extended beyond game-winning hits to any outstanding performance. Rookie Stephen Strasburg was pied by teammate John Lannan after his historic debut when he struck out 14 Pittsburgh batters.[34] Matt Garza of the Tampa Bay Rays was pied by Evan Longoria after Garza pitched the first no-hitter in Rays history July 26, 2010.[35]
On July 26, 2010, the Florida Marlins left fielder Chris Coghlan injured himself while pieing teammate Wes Helms after Helms's single won the game in the bottom of the 11th inning. In response, manager Edwin Rodriguez said that there will be no more such celebratory antics.[35][36]
J.P. Arencibia was pied in the face after hitting two home runs in his MLB debut against the Rays.[37]