Nothing Like A Well-thrown Pie
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- October
- 27
Soupy Sales, who died last week at the age of 83, was a precursor to Uncle Floyd and Pee Wee Herman—and a lot funnier. One of the things that made him so funny was his expert utilization of the comic pie throw, which goes back to the silent comedies of Mack Sennett, Laural and Hardy and later, the Three Stooges.
It’s hardly sophisticated brand of humor, but it still cracks me up. There’s an art to it.
Soupy was a pie connoisseur. He knew that the pie had to have a crust that allowed for pieces of it to slowly fall off the face of the “victim.” To be really funny, the impact also had to have a loud, whirlwind kind of sound to give it that shock and awe feeling.
A key element to confection-based slapstick is the have the proper recipient. Here’s an example of a particularly effective pie-throw, involving, of all people, the rock star, Alice Cooper.
He appeared on Soupy’s kid show in 1979. The setup involves White Fang, the giant dog who was mostly off-camera and had an expressive way of grunting.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 2:14 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
Phil –
Thanx for bringing some good laughs (well really falling off the chair guffaws) with that clip. -:)