Food, of course, is a very serious matter, and when things go wrong—when the hollandaise curdles, when the soufflé falls, when you’ve paid a small fortune for a bad meal in a pretentious restaurant—it can seem downright tragic. And yet there’s often an element of comedy in food, while food is very often used in comedy.
On the positive side, there are certain foods that are pretty much guaranteed to raise a smile: a cupcake, ice cream, a bowl of Jell-O. We’re smiling here about something familiar and comforting. We know where we are with these foods: There will be no terrible surprises in them (unless you’re talking molded Jell-O), and they won’t demand anything of us. These, however, are not the ingredients of laugh-out-loud comedy.
Some foods are comical because they act as great levelers. Nobody can look too grand or earnest when they’ve got barbecue sauce dribbling down their chin, or while eating a hot dog or a banana. And trying to retain your dignity by, say, eating a banana with a knife and fork, as still suggested by various experts on table etiquette, is only likely to make you look downright ridiculous.
The banana, I guess, is the most comical of all foods, the skin as well as the flesh. As a comedy staple, the banana skin under the heel is right up there with the custard pie in the face, though naturally both of these things are way more hilarious when they happen to somebody else than when they happen to you.
Buster Keaton, who claimed never to have thrown a custard pie in one of his own movies, threw plenty in other people’s (a fine distinction), and went so far as to consider himself “the world’s champion custard pie thrower.” His autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, includes a 1917 movie-studio recipe for custard pie—containing no custard whatsoever. Instead, it demands a double-crust base (strong enough for throwing) and a filling of flour, water, and cream, plus a few extra ingredients depending on the person you’re aiming it at. Keaton was a pie-throwing consultant on the movie Hollywood Cavalcade, in which the blonde ingenue Alice Faye got pied 17 times, by Keaton among others. He tells us those custard pies contained blackberries, to contrast with Faye’s pale complexion.
The story goes that Hollywood Cavalcade actually broke the comedy rules of the Hal Roach Studios, which decreed that an attractive young woman should never be on the receiving end of a pie, and you can see the point. We want the pompous ass to get a pie in the face, not the girl. We all know the food-fight scene from the movie Animal House, but the fight itself is much shorter than people remember. The scene is really all about anticipation, knowing that sooner or later John Belushi’s Bluto character is going to go nuts and splatter goo all over those snobs from the other fraternities. He does, and we cheer.
In the end, however, I think there are limits to just how funny a food fight can be. The waste of food always makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s much funnier when people actually eat. I’m thinking of the chocolate-factory episode in I Love Lucy, in which Lucy and Ethel are working on an unforgiving production line. They need to get rid of the ever-growing number of excess chocolates, and the mouth is the obvious place to stash them. I’m thinking, too, of Monty Python’s Mr. Mangetout, who finally explodes as the result of eating one “wafer-thin mint” too many.
I also have a brand-new favorite, from the recent movie The Trip, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. They play men of a certain age who go on a culinary tour of northern England and at one point arrive at an improbable French restaurant in the middle of the countryside, where they’re served something the waiter describes as “a nice little appetizer. You’ve got liquor made out of mallow leaves topped with a fizz which is made out of ginger beer, whisky, as well as chili.” Brydon says, “It’s nice, it tastes of a childhood garden.“ To which Coogan responds with utterly insincere sympathy, “Was there a lot of alcohol in your garden as a child? I’m sorry, Rob.” The scene rapidly, and hilariously, goes downhill from there.
Cartoon characters, animated or otherwise, seem to need a food obsession: Bugs Bunny with his carrots, Popeye with his spinach, Dagwood with his sandwich, Homer Simpson with his doughnuts. These are all common enough foods. As far as I’m aware, there’s no cartoon character obsessed with quinoa or truffles, but maybe somewhere, in some obscure creative corner, there’s one who’s hooked on sour gooseberry, tapioca, and powdered cloves. I’m not making this up at random, I’m quoting Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I think contains one of the greatest comic food scenes in all of literature. Tyrone Slothrop, an American army lieutenant stationed in London during World War II, is forced to sample Mrs. Quoad’s hideous homemade candies. Gooseberry, tapioca, and cloves are not the worst of it. Licorice drops with mayonnaise and orange centers, pepsin-flavored nougat, and a chocolate bonbon packed with ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed also make an appearance, all products of the Quoad kitchen.
We know that kitchens are very good settings for comedy, whether the fluffy, rom-com version of Catherine Zeta-Jones in No Reservations or the more challenging absurdist drama of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, best known as a stage play, though there have been TV versions. A couple of hit men are holed up in a basement and find themselves trying to satisfy the ever more demanding and ludicrous orders sent down by some scary, unknown presence in the restaurant above. Pinter’s plays from this period are generally described as “comedies of menace,” a term that pretty well describes my own brief career working in restaurant kitchens.
So what’s going on here? Why is food so ripe for mirth? Partly I think it’s because humor is always connected in some way with anxiety. We worry about whether we’re eating right, and we certainly worry about whether our cooking’s good enough. If we go to a restaurant, perhaps we worry that we’ll be confronted by a snotty waiter, or that our palates won’t be refined enough to appreciate the chef’s exquisite creations. In all these cases, humor helps to defuse the anxiety and protect us. We wisecrack about the asparagus we’ve overcooked to the wilting point, lest any of our guests do. We make snide remarks about the waiter behind his back, because we suspect he’s doing the same about us.
If you’re on the other side of the serving hatch, customers can be pretty darn funny, too: the table that sends back the venison because it’s too gamey; Steve Martin in The Jerk, who is incensed that there is a snail on his wife’s plate at a French restaurant; the man who asks for his steak tartare cooked medium rare. In these circumstances—as with the curdled hollandaise, the fallen soufflé, and the bill from that joyless, pretentious restaurant—we laugh to stop ourselves from crying.
Geoff Nicholson is a writer in Los Angeles. His books include the novel The Food Chain and the nonfiction Lost Art of Walking. His other articles for Gourmet Live include “Recipes for Disaster,” and “The Art of Eating, the Eating of Art.”