Pie a la Murdoch: The iconoclastic creamers

Tuesday's attempted pieing of Rupert Murdoch during his testimony to the House of Commons was an outrage.

As it was meant to be.

It was also a failure. The assailant, stand-up comic Jonathan May-Bowles, or "Jonnie Marbles," got more shaving cream on himself than on Murdoch. He was restrained by bystanders, including Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, who has emerged a heroine, a stand-up woman. May-Bowles has emerged with shaving cream on his face. (He was charged Wednesday with "behavior causing harassment, alarm or distress in a public place.")

It's not clear why he tried to pie Murdoch. He belongs to the group UK Uncut, which targets tax cheats. But UK Uncut has disavowed him. (Murdoch's News Corp. pays billions in taxes, but - with multiple tax havens, and powerful accounting - well below statutory corporate tax rates.)

The House of Commons was grilling Murdoch on the News of the World scandal, one of the worst crises in journalism history.

How did a silly stunt, born in vaudeville, raised to a sacrament in the silent films of Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin, get into the House of Commons? How did pie-throwing become political protest?

The story of pie (in the face) is about a century old. True, in Mr. Flip of 1909, a pie is pushed into Ben Turpin's mug - but we're talking throwing here. Chaplin may have picked that up from vaudeville man William Hammerstein when Chaplin trod the boards circa 1911. The earliest extant thrown-pie film may be Sennett's 1913 A Noise From the Deep. Mabel Normand pies Fatty Arbuckle in that one.

It's ritual humiliation. It deflates the pompous - and his or her stage. The pie-er yanks the pie-ee into a piece of theater that undermines the seriousness of the pie-ee. Thus its use as political protest.

"In the case of Murdoch," says Barbara Baker, professor of communication at the University of Central Missouri and an authority on slapstick and film, "we have a person of significant power being confronted by the sober body of the House of Commons. And the pie is an attempt to disrupt and destabilize those procedures, as well as to ridicule the recipient, to take him (or her) down a peg or two. But is it successful as a rhetorical tactic? I'm not so sure."

Mary Ellen Balchunis, professor of political science at La Salle University, points out that protest can range from benign placards to violent assassination. "Throwing a pie," she says, "seems pretty innocent when compared. Theoretically, it only hurts the ego of the recipient."

Just ask activist David Horowitz, pied in 2005 at Butler University: "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."

Balchunis says the Murdoch pieing was on the light side: "Murdoch's pie was the 'Soupy Sales' version of shaving cream. It could have been worse - for example, blueberry stains."

Tom Forcade, a Yippie, is widely credited with the first U.S. pieing-as-political-theater. At a May 1970 meeting in Washington of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Forcade served chairman Otto Larsen with a cottage-cheese pie facial. Underground journalist Rex Weiner then formed Agents of Pie Kill, a pie-for-hire posse.

Among APK trainees was one Aron Kay. He became the notorious "Pieman," who graced many greats with gooey goods over 20 years. The list is glittering: McGeorge Bundy, Anita Bryant, E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, Andy Warhol, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Brown, then-N.Y. mayor Abe Beame, William F. Buckley.

"I was inspired by Tom Forcade," says Kay, now 61. "I'm a Groucho Marx-ist and a John Lennon-ist. I came up with the Yippies, with Abbie Hoffman. The Three Stooges I consider my pie-throwing spiritual godfathers." (Moe Howard, head Stooge, taught pie-throwing on a memorable 1973 episode of The Mike Douglas Show, filmed in Philadelphia: http://tiny.cc/b6no6.)

Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, Kay ponders the question: Why pie? "I was a lefty activist protesting conservatives. But I also have to say, I had a lot of fun," he says. "Besides, think about it: Everybody knows somebody in this world that needs a good pieing."

How does he rate the Murdoch pie incident? "I give him credit for trying," Kay says, "but the guy messed up on two counts. First, he missed. Even worse, he didn't get a good picture." The video of the event is unclear. "I always brought my own photographer so it was documented right."

That's the idea: carefully planned theater. As James Agee wrote of Laurel and Hardy, "The first pies were thrown thoughtfully."

"I designed my pies to fit the person," Kay says. He pied Beame with an apple crumb cake "because he was a crumb in the Big Apple, right? And I got Anita Bryant, who was against the gays, with a fruit pie." Kay retired after he pied activist Randall Terry (pineapple cheese) in 1992.

Originally, the pie in the face "signaled a type of anarchy as well as making a mess," says Baker. Maybe a mess was all Jonnie Marbles wanted. But he just couldn't make it stick.