Pieing is the act of throwing a pie at a person. In Britain, a pie in the context of throwing is traditionally referred to as a custard pie. An aluminium pie pan or paper plate filled with whipped cream or more typically, shaving cream can substitute for a real pie, however, bakery pies such as chocolate cream pie, banana cream pie, coconut cream pie, or lemon meringue pie are also used, especially when one desires a more messy and humiliating effect. Warren, Caleb et al. (2020)“What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of Laughter and Amusement.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 2021, Vol. 25(1) 41 –65. (Retrieved March 4, 2026) Brought to a widespread audience as the "pie-in-face" gag in silent film comedies, pieing may sometimes be intended as a harmless practical joke. However, it can also be used as a means of political protest directed against an authority figure, politician, industrialist, or celebrity,Cox, Ana Marie (April, 1999) "The Medium Is the Meringue." Mother Jones. (Retrieved September 20, 2021.) and perpetrators may regard the act as a form of ridicule.
Non-consensual pieing can constitute a punishable offence in criminal law (see, battery). Non-consensual pieing may also be actionable as a civil wrong (tort) giving the victim of the pieing the right to recover damages in a lawsuit.
Pieing and pie fights are a staple of slapstick comedy, and consensual pie "tosses" are also common charity fundraising events, especially in schools.
Slapstick
Pieing has its origins in the "pie in the face" gag from slapstick comedy. It made its first appearance in a music hall sketch called Mumming Birds (1904) produced by the English theatre impresario Fred Karno for the Hackney Empire in London. Immensely popular, it became the longest-running sketch the music halls produced. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, both employed by Karno, were among the music hall comedians who partook in the sketch, while Charlie's older brother Sydney was the first of the brothers to perform it for Karno.
It was first seen in film in the 1909 Essanay Studios silent film Mr. Flip starring Ben Turpin. In the story, Turpin has a pie pushed into his face for taking liberties with the woman behind the pie store counter. 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."
In 1915, Chaplin's film A Night in the Show, which includes the pie in the face gag, brings one of the classic music hall comedy sketches, Mumming Birds, known as A Night in an English Music Hall when Chaplin performed it on tour, into his film work. At least a half dozen films have been made incorporating extended pie-throwing battles. The first was Chaplin's Behind the Screen released in 1916. The definitive pie fight in film occurs in 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 Keystone Hotel featured a large pie-fight ending with the camera taking a pie. Another major pie-fight, their first, appeared in The Three Stooges' In the Sweet Pie and Pie (1941). Pieing had become such an established gag in Hollywood comedy that the song "Make 'Em Laugh" from Singin' In The Rain (1952) concludes with the line "And then you get a great big custard pie in the face!", the movie itself involves a pieing scene. A film involving pies was the comedy The Great Race (1965), known for having the largest pie fight in cinematic history. Its $200,000 pie-fight scene used 4,000 pies and one large cake, and took five days to shoot. Pie fights also featured in Beach Party (1963), Smashing Time (1967) and Blazing Saddles (1974). In Bugsy Malone (1976), the "splurge guns" resembled spud guns which fired custard. Original plans called for Dr. Strangelove (1964) to end with a pie fight; the scene, though filmed, was ultimately deemed excessively farcical by director Stanley Kubrick and removed from the final cut. Surviving stills from the excised pie fight have appeared online.
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 (1947), and also shoves one in Elmer's face in Hare Do. In Shishkabugs (1962), 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. Daffy Dilly (1948) 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. Bugs himself gets pied in Case of the Missing Hare, provoking him to spend the rest of the short wreaking revenge.
Many comedy routines have used a pie as a gag, including ones performed by Soupy Sales and Monty Python, and those of clowns in many circus performances.
A popular Nickelodeon reality show called What Would You Do? also features contraptions designed to hit participants in the face with multiple cream pies, often as punishment for losing, or sometimes as a reward for winning, a game performed on the show. The UK Saturday morning programme Tiswas had custard pies as a regular feature and even had a character called The Phantom Flan Flinger, a masked man who pied people.
The World Custard Pie Throwing Championships take place annually in the village of Coxheath in Kent, England.
Political acts The probable originator of pieing as a political act in the United States was Jim Retherford, former underground newspaper editor and ghost writer of Jerry Rubin's Do It!, who landed a cream pie in the face of former UC Berkeley president Clark Kerr in Bloomington, Indiana, October 14, 1969. Retherford's theatrics were widely reported in the U.S. and European press. The next pie was thrown by Tom 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.Tom Forcade: Unsung Hero of the Counter-culture By Bill Weinberg. World War 4 Report. Aron Kay, also a Yippie, went on to take up Forcade's pieing tactics. Kay pied, among many others, William F. Buckley Jr., Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol. 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", an homage to the concept of pieing).Rutledge, Leigh (1992). The Gay Decades. New York: Penguin Books Ltd. .Murdoch, the Pie Man, and Baked Goods as Political Theatre . By Bill Lichtenstein. July 21, 2011. Huffington Post."Pie-Faced: Why throwing a pie at someone who deserves it is one of the most celebrated traditions in our so-called culture" . By Gersh Kuntzman. Newsweek, April 25, 2005. 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 pied George W. Bush and former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (at 2 minutes and 33 seconds into the video)."Death penalty for pot". Kay pieing George Bush and John Ashcroft in an "animated music video (2003) by northern California artist/animator Brad Frost, of the song "Death Penalty For Pot", by the band Benedict Arnold & The Traitors." on YouTube
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.""A Long Career of Pitching Pastries" . By Rachel Gordon. San Francisco Examiner. November 12, 1998.
Inspired by Kay, pro-choice activists pied British far-right Christian activist Mary Whitehouse in Brisbane during a 1978 speaking tour of Australia.
A noted victim of pieing was Microsoft founder Bill Gates who was pied in Belgium in 1998 by serial anarchist entarteur Noël Godin. 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. Other victims include designer Karl Lagerfeld, American singer Kenny Rogers, former Dutch finance minister Gerrit Zalm and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
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. 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; they stated 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?""The Art of Pieing. Nothing cuts through the veneer of the powerful like a banana cream" . By Tooker Gomberg. Now (Toronto). July 17–23, 2003.
In 2001, environmentalist Mark Lynas pied Bjørn Lomborg at a book event due to his disagreement with the arguments he put forward in The Skeptical Environmentalist.
"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."Pied Snipers" . By Andrew Duffy. Southam News. January 31, 1999. Newsweek columnist Gersh Kuntzman wrote that pieing "deserves to be one of the most celebrated traditions in our so-called culture."
Sometimes pieing targets suffer the prank with good humor. Jean-Luc Godard was very pleased at being pied and said "this is what happens when silent movies meet talking pictures"; 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. 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."
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, Ontario, in an act of protest against the seal hunt in Canada by animal rights group PETA."Anti-sealing PETA protester smacks Minister with tofu pie" . By John Burman and Mike McNeil. Toronto Star. January 25, 2010. 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."