“Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. Comedy is when you accidentally walk into an open sewer
and die.”– Mel Brooks
Years back I wrote a play, Sounds of Silents: The Essanay Years. Researching it, I essentially lived in the microfilm room at the Harold Washington Library here in Chicago. They would throw me out on closing and I’d be back first thing in the morning. It was fascinating, going back in time, seeing life in that microfilm. What I was looking into were turn of the century Chicago Daily News and Tribune scans that you can’t Google. I was documenting Chicago’s place in the rise of motion pictures circa 1915. Two major companies were located in Chicago 100 years ago, Selig and Essanay.
Among the many reasons Essanay should be remembered is that in 1915, it purchased the contract of a Mack Sennett comic, a recently unknown English import named Charlie Chaplin. They paid him $1,250 a week. Cheap by today’s standards, but this was 100 years ago…it was the largest contract ever paid at the time. The major gamble by Essanay boss George Spoor lasted only one year. Chaplin didn’t like the Chicago cold and made just one film here, His New Job.
All this is backstory to today’s post on — yes!– pie fights. What’s the deal with pie fights? Why are they comically timeless? Some of it goes back to the famous Mel Brooks’ axiom. More to the point is a Chaplin explanation that I found in a Tribune article dating back about 99 years. Here’s what he said on the subject:
“Mack Sennett saw the only thing funnier than a man falling down a staircase is a man socked with a custard pie…the pie isn’t thrown at all. It’s pushed forward. Six to eight feet with the Keystone bunch, though (Fatty) Arbuckle’s got us all beat. He throws perfectly from ten feet, deadly accurate with either hand. Sennett’s formula is: Something must happen every few feet of film. It must be exactly what the audience expects but never when. Sennett knows the public wants vulgarity. People who call themselves civilized have a streak of barbarity relief by laughter.”
That explanation is gold for you comedy writers. What they want but not when they expect it. And the vulgarity… amped up by 100 years and Adam Sandler, but still the same. And so with that, here are some famous pie fights that have come down through time. Bon appetite!
- CHAPLIN- VINTAGE FOOTAGE
- 3 STOOGES
- SOUPY SALES
- THE GREAT RACE
- BLAZING SADDLES
- FAMILY GUY
