Here's the VERY dark tale of a Wild West Pieing, in a time before slapstick comedy was funny and hitting a person in the face with a pie would likely earn you a bellyful of lead...
It's the story of "boot-black and notorious rough" John Lannigan (A.K.A. "Dublin Jack") of Old San Francisco, who smashed a cranberry pie in the face of the daughter of Alexander Green for reasons unknown...just three years after the end of the Civil War!
Green confronted "Dublin Jack" after the pie throwing incident (I like to think that he opened the conversation with "Smile when you throw that pie, Mister!"), and within seconds received several serious stab wounds, then killed Lannigan instantly with four pistol shots.
Obviously the fine art of pie throwing still needed a LOT of refining at this early stage. Offhand, I'd say that "Dublin Jack" made a number of serious mistakes here, including:
1) Choosing a cranberry pie (not messy enough!)
2) Targeting a girl who most certainly should have been "off limits"
3) Lacking any discernible sense of "comeuppance value" in selecting a target, or good timing in setting up the pie in the face
4) Stabbing the father of the victim repeatedly when he (quite reasonably) demanded an explanation for why he threw a pie in his daughter's face
5) Failing to understand that a fatal shooting is a very poor final "payoff" for a good "tit-for-tat" slapstick exchange (Laurel and Hardy would do this much better 60 years later (!) in "Battle of the Century")
6) Being an obvious total psychopath rather than a good-humored prankster
7) Failing to get any good pictures (or daguerreotypes) of the pieing--though in all fairness, perhaps this was due to the 20 second exposure time then required to capture an image?
Anyway--nothing fun (or, God knows, erotic) to see here, but since this is BY FAR the earliest reference to a pie in the face I've come across, I thought a few of you might find this of some historic interest as a reminder that we stand on the shoulders of giants--and, on occasion, lunatics!
Wow! Great find! This is really crazy history here, so sad it was so violent, but so glad the young lady's dignity was avenged. Now you've got me going down the rabbit hole on the history of slapstick, thanks for sharing!
Love you, too
