Cream Pies

So as I am in DC, I managed to spend part of the evening in the company of truly evil people, i.e. Republican congressmen and staffers at a reception that someone suggest I attend, probably as a comedic social experiment. For many reasons I will not go into detail except to say that I was a fish out of waters that support terrible lives for Americans. Also there was 1 minority in a room of at least 150 people, not counting the servants who of course were almost all black. Welcome to the Beltway. Anyway, this seems appropriate this evening:

So it is with unrestrained glee that we share the news of the recovery of a long-missing portion of the greatest pie-throwing fight ever recorded, far superior to the pastry melee of “In the Sweet Pie and Pie,” a 1941 Three Stooges short, or the baked-goods battle in “The Great Race,” a 1965 comedy with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.

That, of course, would be the epic custard conflagration in “The Battle of the Century,” a 1927 Laurel and Hardy short that dispensed with 3,000 pies, thrown not with abandon but with slow-burn precision, heightening the comedic effect.

For several decades, the 20-minute, two-reel classic has been missing its second reel, which provided most of the logic for why dozens of people were pelting one another with pastries. Film historians have puttied the gaps in “Battle” with explanatory title cards, but these could never replicate Laurel’s look of thought-free innocence, Hardy’s frown of eternal exasperation.

More pie throwing in DC would raise the intellectual discourse of the city significantly.