How does one respond to receiving a pie in the face?
Well, if you're a top-hatted aristocrat in a comedy, you drop your monocle, sputter comically and allow the audience to guffaw at your sudden loss of dignity. If you're Ralph Klein, you put your assailant in jail. And if you're a gangster from the film Bugsy Malone (1976), you fall down dead.
Bugsy Malone is a musical gangster film in which all of the roles are played by children. Since gangsters tend to shoot each other a lot, and it would be traumatic to see singing preteens massacre one another with Tommy guns, all of the firearms have been replaced with cream pies. There are still “rubout” scenes, in which doomed hoodlums plead for their lives as the mob moves in with their plates full of dessert topping, and the music turns ominous. Then the poor kids get splattered with whipped cream and fall to the floor, displaying no signs of life. This is all surprisingly brutal.
The dessert-themed violence escalates when a rival gang acquires a shipment of “splurge guns,” which can drench a roomful of thugs in deadly frosting in seconds flat. As the gang war escalates, so do the fatalities, with each “creamed” character disappearing from the narrative until the hectic finale, in which the cream-spattered criminals stop fighting, link arms, and sing about friendship and reconciliation.
While Bugsy Malone is unusual for using slapstick to actually kill characters, it is not wholly unique in this respect. The 1964 Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its two film incarnations (1971 and 2005) feature a lineup of disagreeable children who all get thematically “bumped off” for failing to comply with the rules laid out by master chocolatier Willy Wonka. One child falls into a chocolate river and is last seen being sucked through a pipe into the factory's machinery. Another turns blue and swells up into a spherical shape after tasting a toxic piece of chewing gum. Yet another gets tossed down a garbage chute, and another gets shrunken down to miniature size. While we are assured that they all survived the process, and in fact see them all again at the story's conclusion, they are still removed from the narrative and treated as though permanently out of the picture. In fact, Charlie is awarded ownership of the factory by virtue of being the “only one left.”
There's plenty of slapstick violence in the British comedy TV series “The Goodies” (1970-1982), including instances in which characters seem to be “killed” by slapstick. The show is surreal and fast paced, and the visual nature of the gags makes it seem like Monty Python for children, though it can be enjoyed by viewers of all ages. The protagonists (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie) hire themselves out as all-purpose problem solvers and usually face ridiculous challenges, such as subduing a 90-foot-tall kitten that attacks London. While the show is live action, the special effects, music and fast-motion camera techniques often give it a cartoonish feel, and it's not unusual to see the characters hovering in midair and pinwheeling their legs before falling off a building, à la Wile E. Coyote.
The Goodies staged a particularly effective slapstick massacre in the episode “Bunfight at the O.K. Tearoom.” Here, frontier desperado Garden is gunning for his two former friends due to a betrayal of some sort. For some unspecified reason, the boys carry plastic tomato-shaped ketchup squirters instead of guns. Plenty of innocent bystanders get squirted with tomato sauce in the ensuing showdown. Everyone reacts to the ketchup as though they've received a grievous or fatal wound, but the ridiculous music and sound effects keep things agreeably goofy, despite the visually disturbing fact that the victims are all drenched in red liquid.
While we're on the topic of death by slapstick, The Goodies is also responsible for one of the few recorded instances of literal death by laughter. Alex Mitchell, a bricklayer from King's Lynn, was a huge fan of the program. On March 24, 1975, he collapsed in his chair after laughing at the “Kung Fu Kapers” episode for a solid 25 minutes. Apparently the sight of a kung fu battle between a black-pudding-wielding Oddie and a bagpipe-wielding Scotsman was too much for the 50-year-old Goodies fan. His widow reportedly sent a letter to the Goodies thanking them for making her husband's final moments so jolly.
