Breaking down status structures, says Kay, represents the central tenet of pieing. Kay cites the influence of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers ("Jewish comedians who, as George Carlin would say, 'created chaos out of order' in a setting in which they never belonged"). The pie-thrower plays jester, and the jester, says Kay, is an entirely political role.
Of course the Yippies, who were in bed with the hard-left political establishment, spent their lives fighting conservatism, and most pieing targets over the years, from William Colby to Ann Coulter, have been conservatives. But even Kay points out that pieing, as art form or by means of political expression, seeks only to deflate the individual ego: that insidious personality engine that Kay claims to have expelled from himself back in that tent in 1974.
Belgian anarchist and surrealist pie-thrower Noel Godin, for example, only pies those who "take themselves seriously." He's hit iconic liberal filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard at the Cannes Film Festival as well as progressive French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévi. Godin claims Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as his two most desired targets, and his seeming conservatism makes sense.
Rupert Murdoch attack joins the pantheon of pie throwing
A brief history of pie throwing in public
Read this: The history of pie throwing; Murdoch’s wife
Murdoch is the latest in a long line of pie-throwing pranksters’ targets
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