Say ‘pi’ but hear ‘pie’: Celebrate National Pi Day with best pie fights
Mar 14, 2019, 5:00 AM | Updated: 11:15 am
Take a good look at the calendar Thursday: It’s March 14.
Not enough of a hint? Let’s go more numerical: it’s 3/14. Pi, as any math fan will blurt out.
National Pi Day celebrates the mathematical constant that goes on forever, for whatever mathy reason.
People are obsessed with pi. Sure, it starts out at 3.14, but they keep figuring out ways to add numbers into the trillions.
There’s this easy one: 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510.
That is child’s play!
There are people who memorize pi well into the tens of thousands.
Like the guy who memorized 70,000 pi decimal places.
If he can’t recall his debit card PIN number we will laugh until we pass out.
But enough about pi. We’re thinking about its soundalike — pie.
Aside from eating pie, throwing pies looks to be a lot of fun. At least on TV and in the movies.
Pie time!
‘The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon’
The host actually convinces celebrities to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Pie. While not a fight, per se, someone is going to get hit with a pie. Generally it was an attractive woman. Jada Pinkett Smith, Jennifer Garner, Lucy Liu and Kelly Ripa got pied and were good sports.
‘Bugsy Malone’
This big-screen musical featured kids as a 1920 gangsters. Among those kids back in 1976 were Jodie Foster and Scott Baio. It was an odd movie, but there was an epic pie fight.
‘The Feud’
This little-seen 1989 comedy starred many now-familiar faces, among them Stanley Tucci and Rene Auberjonois. The big fight goes down in a small bakery.
Three Stooges ‘Half-Wit’s Holiday’
These guys were the champs at pie fights and various forms of violence. The funny kind of violence! Moe, Larry and Curly are at a fancy party. Right there is a problem already. Anyway, pies start flying at 14:30.
Laurel and Hardy ‘Battle of the Century’
This short piece of silent-film ingenuity used over 3,000 cream pies. Desperate for money, the guys — well, Ollie since he always came up with easy money schemes — put together what is essentially insurance fraud. The ol’ slip on banana and threaten to sue someone. Go on, Stan, fall. Some other poor schlub beats him to it by accident. A guy carrying pies. Let’s get this party started.
Soupy Sales
There was likely no one who got hit in the kisser with a pie than kiddie TV show host Soupy Sales.
Starting in mid 1950s and well into the 1960s, every episode of the “Soupy Sales Show” ended with the host getting splattered with pie. Celebrities showed up just get to pied (mostly it was shaving cream), too, including Frank Sinatra.
‘Three’s Company: The Bake-Off’
In a third-season episode of the sitcom, Jack Tripper, the chef wannabe, is all set to do a solid for his cooking school at a big time food competition. Until he finds out roommate Chrissy Snow ate his entry. Blah, blah, blah, at the contest a pie fight breaks out.
‘The Great Race’
Moviemaker Blake Edwards so enjoyed the Laurel and Hardy pie fight, he did his own version in a 1965 movie starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, among others. The pie fight took three days to film.
