Thomas Friedman just the latest in a long tradition of Pieing...

12:51 PM PT, Apr 24 2008

The video of NYT columnist Thomas Friedman being "pied" during his Earth Day speech surfaced on YouTube late yesterday. In it, you can see the two perpetrators (one of whom has now been ID'd, according to The Brown Daily Herald), vault up onto the stage and hurl pies at Friedman with all the accuracy of Rick "The Wild Thing" Vaughn before he got his glasses. Friedman got a few dollops of cream on his shirtsleeve, and slipped a little on what looked like some shortening, but was otherwise unharmed.

The video was posted under the account of the Greenwash Guerrillas, a radical (and, obviously, militant) environmentalist group that takes issue with Friedman's approach to climate change, saying his version of ''Green' [is] as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face."

Who among us could recover from such an embarrassment and somehow continue the speech, undeterred, perhaps even laughing it off? Well, not Friedman, anyway. He looked irritated and discombobulated as he walked off the stage in order, presumably, to go clean up.

Of course, the pie in the face is a tradition dating at least back to Vaudeville, the Keystone Kops and every serious comedy duo or trio in the first half of the 20th century. Later it gained currency as a political action. Here's Wikipedia's list of people who have been pied.

One of its earliest victims was anti-gay American singer Anita Bryant, who at least managed (as you can see in the below video) the amusingly homophobic line,"Well, at least it's a fruit pie," before beginning a prayer for the assailant's immortal soul.