Ben Turpin: The First Pie in the Face

The First Pie in the Face

Before there was slapstick comedy as we know it, before Laurel and Hardy, before the Three Stooges, there was a cross-eyed kid from New Orleans named Ben Turpin who helped invent the whole genre.

Bernard Turpin was born in New Orleans in 1869, the son of a candy store owner named Ernest Turpin. Somewhere along the way, young Ben developed — or perhaps always had — the dramatically crossed eyes that would become the most famous physical feature in silent film comedy. He left New Orleans for the vaudeville circuit and eventually landed in Chicago, where he was working as a janitor at Essanay Studios when he got his shot in front of the camera.

In 1909, Turpin appeared in a short film called Mr. Flip, which featured what is believed to be the first pie-in-the-face scene in cinema history. Think about that. Every pie gag, every slapstick food fight, every physical comedy bit involving something messy hitting someone's face — it all traces back to a kid from New Orleans getting hit with a pie in 1909.

Turpin went on to become one of the biggest comedy stars of the silent film era. He worked with Charlie Chaplin at Essanay Studios, starred in dozens of films for Mack Sennett's studio through the roaring twenties, and was famous enough to insure his crossed eyes with Lloyd's of London — reportedly for a million dollars — against the possibility that they might uncross.

When talking pictures arrived in the late 1920s, Turpin retired rather than adapt. He'd invested wisely in real estate and didn't need the money. He'd occasionally take a cameo for a flat fee of a thousand dollars, including his final appearance in Laurel and Hardy's Saps at Sea in 1940, the year he died.

Ben Turpin is one of those New Orleanians whose contribution to American culture is so foundational that people don't even realize it has a source. The man literally invented the pie in the face. New Orleans gave the world jazz, Creole cooking, and the very first gag in slapstick comedy.