“You can’t throw pies in comedies anymore!”

Laurel and Hardy’s “The Battle of the Century” didn’t immediately rehabilitate the pie fight in Hollywood at the end of 1927. But here are three data points that show the trope moving back to acceptance, if never full respectability.

Sometime in the late 1920s the Weiss brothers’ Artclass company produced a short featuring young actors Bobby Nelson (1922–1978) and Albert Schaefer (1916–1942) and a pie fight. This picture was obviously made on the cheap, shot outdoors to avoid having to build sets. It shows no logic in character, plot, or basic physics.

This movie survives in a German print, in loose footage, and in the Weiss Brothers Collection at UCLA. I’m guessing at the date based on the apparent age of Bobby Nelson, between his waifish appearances in “The Doughboy” (1926), “Sunshine of Paradise Alley” (1926), and “Perils of the Jungle“ (1927) and his post-haircut westerns.

The only title I’ve found linked to this footage is “Bobby’s Pie Fight”—“Bobby’s Kuchenschlacht” in Germany and “Il combattimento di Bobby” in Italy. However, that title might have been attached when the Weiss brothers recut their 1920s films for television syndication in the series Chuckle Heads.

Unfortunately, the Weiss brothers were near the bottom of the barrel among Hollywood producers. They saved money by skipping such steps as registering copyrights and screening movies for critics. As a result, scholars can’t even say when most of their movies were released. “Bobby’s Pie Fight” has no IMDB listing, so I can’t confirm its original title or date.

Assuming that “Bobby’s Pie Fight” was the title, that shows Artclass believed that subject would attract rather than turn off its target audience. At the same time, the company made sure the pie wagon was crudely labeled “Hokum Pie Co.” to signal to adults that they knew they were slinging an old joke. This pie fight was just for the kids.

Next comes the Our Gang comedy “Shivering Shakespeare,” directed by Anthony Mack in 1929 and released in January 1930 (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner; Lord Heath).

Like several other early talking pictures in the series, this was a remix of silent films from a few years before. As in “Stage Fright” (1923), it showed the gang being dragooned into putting on a play set during Nero’s reign. As in “Uncle Tom’s Uncle” (1926), the kids in the audience pelt the kids on the stage with food.

“Uncle Tom’s Uncle” (and its direct remake, “Spanky” [1932]) showed the audience throwing vegetables. For “Shivering Shakespeare,” in contrast, the theatergoers are supplied with two booths full of pies, apparently from a fundraising bake sale. Furthermore, that audience includes both kids (rowdies led by Jack McHugh) and dignified-looking adults.

The result is a pie fight much like “The Battle of the Century”—the first in a talking picture, some scholars posit. As in that earlier Roach studio film, there’s a gradual build-up of pie-throwing, trying to make the action meaningful instead of just messy. Mack filmed some of that action in slow motion, leaving those shots with no sound. The result isn’t entirely satisfactory, but five years earlier no respected studio would have even tried such hokum.

Finally, in 1931 Educational Films released “The Lure of Hollywood,” part of the Hollywood Girls series (IMDB; YouTube). These were definitely movies about and for adults, not children.

In “The Lure of Hollywood” a mix-up leads a young studio props man to think that a movie star is hitting on his hopeful-starlet girlfriend. During the filming of a big musical number on the theme of custard pies, therefore, the props man throws a pie at the movie star. That devolves into a pie fight, the two cameras still rolling.

A studio executive bustles onto the set and shouts: “You can’t throw pies in comedies anymore! The public won’t laugh at it.” That was, of course, the standard wisdom of movie makers and critics for a decade from the late 1910s to the late 1920s.

The film’s heroines leave Los Angeles in a cheap used car, their Hollywood dreams in ruins. But then the studio staff views the rushes from that supposedly ruined scene. The screening room erupts in laughter. The same executive says: “That’s the funniest thing we’ve ever photographed. We should have gone in for that pie-throwing long ago!”

Pie-throwing thus appears restored to its status as a Hollywood gag—a classic gag, in fact. Being able to depict that turnaround was undoubtedly gratifying for the director of “The Lure of Hollywood”: credited as William Goodrich, that was actually the Keystone veteran Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

The Significance of “Playin’ Hookey”

“Playin’ Hookey,” credited to director Anthony Mack (IMDB; YouTube; The Lucky Corner; Dave Lord Heath), is not one of the more inspired Our Gang comedies. Like a number of the series’ other silent shorts, it feels like two half-developed stories with only a loose connection between them.

In the first half, Joe Cobb’s dog Pansy gets blamed for scaring chickens and destroying property. Pansy’s misbehavior is actually the fault of Joe’s little brother Wheezer, played by Bobby Hutchins. In this stretch of the series, Wheezer was an unstoppable engine of chaos.

Joe’s dad prepares to kill the dog with a shotgun. [Kids’ comedy, folks!] But Joe unloads the gun and tells Pansy to play dead. He sneaks her away and tries to find her refuge with Farina and his little sister, portrayed by Sunny and Jannie Hoskins. Jannie’s character is called Zuccini because almost all the series’ black kids got assigned food names; usually Farina’s sister was named Mango, but other exceptions were Arnica and Trellis.

Then a police chase happens nearby. All the big kids run to see. That action turns out to be a scene from a movie being filmed on the streets of Culver City. By a stroke of luck, the movie crew is looking for a dog that can play dead. Joe offers to bring Pansy to the studio for $5. His pals sneak in after him.

In fact, the gang sneaks into the All-American Studios by pretending to be dummies in a truck, the exact same way the gang got into the West Coast Studios in “Dogs of War” (1923). That short also began as one story—an elaborate parody of trench warfare—and turned into a romp through movie sets. William Gillespie appeared in both films, in the first as a harried director and in the second as a harried actor.

For the rest of “Playin’ Hookey,” the kids and dog run around the studio, disrupt scenes being filmed in a variety of genres, and tangle with actors and security guards. At one odd moment we see the Triceratops costume from Laurel and Hardy’s “Flying Elephants,” filmed in early May 1927. Indeed, that Triceratops gets more screen time in “Playin’ Hookey” than in the surviving “Flying Elephants.”

Eventually, the action shifts to a set in a kitchen filled with custard pies and buns, the latter for some reason being filled with gunpowder. Charlie Hall plays a comedian made up to look as much like Chaplin as possible without risking a lawsuit. There’s a line of cops in old-fashioned helmets and long coats, looking nothing like the police officers earlier in this film. In short, we’ve entered a travesty of the Keystone Studio as it was more than a decade before.

The kids run onto that set. They see the comedian being chased by a knife-wielding chef. The gang’s current freckled boy—skinny, bespectacled Jay R. Smith—picks up a pie and throws it at the chef. Soon the other kids are tossing pies, as well as those exploding buns. Chaos ensues, but not hilarity.

Critics might quibble that this isn’t a full pie fight since nobody throws anything back at the kids. But the action does include the usual detail of pastry flying wild and hitting people not part of the initial conflict. Among the adults struck with pies are those Keystone-style cops, an actress played by Dorothy Coburn, and her hairdresser played by Edith Fortier (usually on set as the Hoskinses’s aunt and chaperone).

Eventually the studio security team led by Tiny Sandford catches the gang and literally throws them out of the studio. We never learn what will happen to Pansy. That concern was back in the first half of the movie, after all.

“Playin’ Hookey” isn’t a very interesting film. Even the backstage look at the Roach lot is unrevealing since the set-ups are so artificial; “Dogs of War” shows more. But “Playin’ Hookey” is significant as an example of a pie fight shortly before Laurel and Hardy’s lauded “Battle of the Century,” reflecting how the studio viewed that trope (IMDB; YouTube).

But wait! you say. “The Battle of the Century” is a 1927 film. “Playin’ Hookey” is listed as from 1928.

Quite true, I reply. But “Playin’ Hookey” was made in the summer of 1927 while “The Battle of the Century” went into production on 5 October. (For a complex discussion of when “Playin’ Hookey” was made, see its page at the Lucky Corner. For equivalent information about “The Battle of the Century,” see Dave Lord Heath’s page.)

MGM released “The Battle of the Century” on the very last day of 1927. Roach’s previous distributor, Pathé, had the rights to “Playin’ Hookey,” and it held that picture back until the first day of 1928. As a result, its significance has been masked.

“The Battle of the Century” starts as a boxing movie, inspired by the Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey fight of 22 Sept 1927. In talking about where to go from there, someone on the writing staff suggested a pie fight.

The Hal Roach Studio was small and friendly. Hall, Coburn, Sandford, and other players in the Our Gang picture also acted in Laurel and Hardy movies that summer. Stan Laurel and his fellow writers had to have known about the making of “Playin’ Hookey.”

That picture reflected the dominant industry thinking about pie fights at the time: they were hokum, a relic of the previous decade, entertaining only for kids. A couple of years later, Laurel told Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times that simply throwing pies “really had passed out with Keystone”—exactly as depicted in the Our Gang film.

Looking for something new, Laurel rethought the trope. “We made every one of the pies count,” he said. The scene wasn’t just messy chaos. It was messy chaos that built up gradually from character interactions. “The Battle of the Century” was a hit, and it resurrected the pie fight as nostalgic fun.

COMING UP: A changed Hollywood.

“Real honest to goodness…pie slinging contests”

Mass pie-tossing definitely returned to American movies in 1927, and not just in Laurel and Hardy’s “Battle of the Century,” released in December.

The surviving examples appeared first in a particular type of movie: the kid gang comedy. That makes sense because the core viewers of those movies were so young they weren’t:

• tired of the Keystone-style comedy of the previous decade, given that they had probably never seen those films.
• influenced by what the press deemed properly funny for modern audiences.

In May 1927, the Bray Studios registered a short called “The Big Pie Raid,” directed by Stan De Lay (IMDB; YouTube; clearer extract on YouTube). This was part of the McDougall Alley series, running from 1926 to 1928—an obvious imitation of the Our Gang comedies, but with even more blatant racism.

The Library of Congress filing for “The Big Pie Raid” summarized its plot like this:

The two gangs are having it out on the football field. The winning team has been promised a party by one of the girl spectators. Oatmeal, a little colored lad, wins the day for his side and the result is that the team goes down to enjoy the blowout. After much ice cream and cake and speech making they adjourn to the lawn to play games.

The losers of the football game however are on the job and attack the party with mud pies. Real honest to goodness mud pie slinging contests ensue with the victors of the morning coming out victorious but not until all the pies of a bakery wagon had been used and not until Oatmeal had come to the rescue with his little friend Farina [sic—Fatima], that gasser of animals, the skunk.

At around the twelve-minute mark, a wagon helpfully labeled PIES loses a wheel near the kids’ mud fight. That leads to a “Real honest to goodness” pie fight, with combatants and one spectator hit. Since Bray named the movie after that part of the scenario, the studio clearly saw the pie fight as an attraction for its target audience.

The typographical error inserting the name Farina into the synopsis of “The Big Pie Raid” shows how much the makers of this series had the Our Gang movies on their minds. McDougall Alley featured a little black child called Oatmeal, played by Hannah Washington. Just as the character of Farina was variously identified as a girl or a boy in early years, “The Big Pie Raid” presents Oatmeal as a boy so that he can play in the football game.

Even though Oatmeal is the hero of both the football game and the subsequent fight, he and his Chinese-stereotype friend Free-Gin have to be snuck into the older white kids’ party. One difference between this movie and the typical Our Gang shorts is that the McDougall Alley kids are more bourgeois than their rivals rather than poorer.

In December 1927, Fox released “Wild Puppies,” directed by Clyde Carruth (IMDB; YouTube; Library of Congress shot list). Like “The Big Pie Raid,” this short comedy moves from a football game to a gang fight that parodies trench warfare. However, its special effects are more elaborate and amusing. While most of the missiles are vegetable, ultimately fat boy Albert Schaefer throws pies down onto three members of the rival gang. The climactic bits show the bad guys trying to escape a lion, scenes that actor Coy Watson, Jr., wrote about in The Keystone Kid.

In both “The Big Pie Raid” and “Wild Puppies,” the leader of the rival gang, and the person whose face takes the most mess, was Jack McHugh. He’d been the center of an earlier kid gang series from Century before being upstaged by Malcolm Sebastian as “Big Boy,” his little brother.

McHugh would make one appearance in an Our Gang film: “Shivering Shakespeare” (1930). Once again, he played a rival gang leader who starts a pie fight. It seems to have been a specialty.

COMING UP: But that wasn’t the first pie-throwing in an Our Gang movie.

“Extracted from a pie slinging episode”

In 1916 Charlie Chaplin released a movie called “Behind the Screen,” in which his character worked in the props department of a movie studio (IMDB; YouTube).

At the time Chaplin was under contract with Mutual, having moved on from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. In this movie he made fun of one of Keystone’s trademarks, the thrown pie, with a scene labeled “The comedy department rehearsing a new idea.”

That involved a Keystone-style cop throwing pies incompetently, then Chaplin throwing a lot of pies at big Eric Campbell while ducking most of the pies thrown back at him. It went well beyond what surviving Keystone movies show, leaving that studio with no new territory to explore.

If Chaplin wanted to convey that pie-throwing was now old hat, some critics were already ahead of him on that score. The Moving Picture World review of “Behind the Screen” said:

There is throughout a distinct vein of vulgarity which is unnecessary, even in slapstick comedy. A great deal of comedy is intended to be extracted from a pie slinging episode which occurs during the rehearsal of a couple of scenes in a moving picture studio.

Soon Hollywood filmmakers were assuring people they had moved beyond pie-throwing. The comedian Lloyd Hamilton wrote in an essay in Motography in 1918:

There is not one phase in the production of motion picture comedies today that isn’t a great improvement over the fun film of the past. Of course everyone has his opinion as to the cause of the great improvement. The biggest reason is the public or fans themselves. They have become tired of the old hokum comedy, the poor sets, hideous make-ups and other stuff such as throwing pies. A year or two an audience would scream if someone was hit in the face with a pie–but today the kids are the only ones who seem to enjoy it…

In addition to quoting that essay, Silentology also showed an advertisement for a 1918 Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran movie that promised “No pie throwing.”

Over the next several years, many newspapers and magazines used “pie throwing” or “pie fight” as a synecdoche for all old-fashioned comic gags that sophisticated modern moviegoers would surely shun.

This despite the fact that there had been few to no fights with pies (as opposed to a pastry thrown singly) in movies aside from “Behind the Screen.” Like “bra burning,” the “pie fight” went straight from one isolated example to cliché without ever actually having been common.

The silent movie musician and scholar Ben Modell has written:

The confusing thing about the custard pie equivalent of a snowball fight is that it appears nowhere in silent movies except in this short [“Behind the Screen”] and in [Laurel and Hardy’s] “Battle of the Century” (1927). There are individual pies thrown in Keystone films, but no pie fights. Are all the pie fights in films from the Nickelodeon era…and are all lost films?

In fact, at least a couple of Hollywood pie fights appeared shortly before “Battle of the Century,” one filmed at the same Hal Roach Studio. How did they slip past critical opprobrium? The answer lies in that Lloyd Hamilton quotation above.

TOMORROW: “the kids are the only ones who seem to enjoy it.”