What does the death of Soupy Sales remind us of the Yankees pie in the face act?”
John Jeansonne writes in Newsday: The death of loopy comic Soupy Sales late Thursday is a reminder that the Yankees have this pie-in-the-face thing all wrong. Throughout a season of dramatic endings, in which the Yankees have won a startling 17 games in their final at-bat on their apparent march to the World Series (stay tuned), first-year Yankee pitcher A.J. Burnett somehow has determined pie-throwing to be a celebratory act, with the pied victim representative of hero status. This would be a bit like saying that George W. Bush should have been honored to have two shoes thrown at him by that Iraqi TV journalist — an interpretation that would have prompted Sales, who was 83, to roll out one of his nutty expressions: “I laughed so hard my brains fell out.” At 32, Burnett might — just barely — claim youthful ignorance, since Sales’ peak as a cult figure of daffy schtick dates to the 1960s. But what Soupy did by repeatedly taking cream pies in the puss — and, to a lesser extent, having hi
The death of loopy comic Soupy Sales late Thursday is a reminder that the Yankees have this pie-in-the-face thing all wrong. Throughout a season of dramatic endings, in which the Yankees have won a startling 17 games in their final at-bat on their apparent march to the World Series (stay tuned), first-year Yankee pitcher A.J. Burnett somehow has determined pie-throwing to be a celebratory act, with the pied victim representative of hero status. This would be a bit like saying that George W. Bush should have been honored to have two shoes thrown at him by that Iraqi TV journalist — an interpretation that would have prompted Sales, who was 83, to roll out one of his nutty expressions: “I laughed so hard my brains fell out.” To be hit with a pie, going back to the sight gag’s apparent origin in a 1913 Mack Sennett silent film, is not — and never was — meant to be a compliment. And it certainly was not conduct designed to honor anything approaching grand accomplishment.
