Did he invent….
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Roscoe Arbuckle
basketball01 — 19 years ago(March 04, 2007 08:49 PM)
The classic pie in the face gag? I was just wondering because I think it is hilarious and a staple of classic American comedy, but nobody seems to know who the first one to throw or take a pie in the face was. I thought it might be him because of the time period. If it was him, I think he should get the recognition for being a brilliant innovative comedian.
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SnorrSm1989 — 19 years ago(March 11, 2007 12:50 PM)
Unlike his "rivals" Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, who largely abandoned pie-throwing as a routine-gag, Arbuckle always insisted that "the minds of his audience mainly was the minds of 12-year olds" and thus he kept on doing the traditional gag until his career got ruined by the infamous scandal late in 1921.
It's an interesting fact that most classical gags from the very early American movie comedies were partly taken from vaudeville, but the pie-throwing seems to be a pure motion-picture phenomenon. According to Mack Sennett's autobiography
King of Comedy
(co-written by Cameron Shipp), the actual inventor of throwing a pie in the face of another as a gag was Mabel Normand (who appeared as Arbuckle's leading lady in several of his comedies). Just a few steps from the Keystone Studios there was a bakery, which frequently filled the comedians' stomachs. One day, Mabel brought a couple of apple pies to the set. When passing a jocular cameraman, she truly jocular in her own right smashed the pie in his face. People around noticed the laughter this little gag created, and the pie was brought to the movies and turned out as a symbol of wittyness. (The apple pies were soon replaced by blueberry pies, inasmuch as they appeared as far more visible on people's faces when viewed in black and white. According to legends, the baker across the studio eventually got extremely wealthy.)
To summarize, according to Sennett, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was not the original inventor of "the classic pie in the face gag," but he was certainly one of the comedians who used the invention most frequently during the era. Besides, it's worth mentioning that the earliest movie I can remember seeing which included that gag is
Fatty Joins the Force
, released in November 1913 and the poor person who gets the pie in his face is no other than Arbuckle himself! -
SnorrSm1989 — 19 years ago(March 17, 2007 12:09 PM)
Since my last reply, I've read in the booklet included in the DVD-set
The Forgotten Films of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle
that the first movie to ever use the "pie"-gag reportedly was in
A Voice From the Deep
(1912), also starring Arbuckle I knew this previously, but I'd forgotten all about it. However, no copy is known to exist today.