Let’s gather round the campfire, and sing our campfire song,
Our C-A-M-P-F-I-R-E-S-O-N-G song –
Ok, wrong programme. But a group of best friends are also gathering around a campfire in this situation, so there’s a link there, I guess. Friends Chris, Verne and Teddy manage to convince storyteller and main man Gordy to weave a tale of epic proportions during their journey to find a dead body. And what a tale it is. It is the legend of David ‘Lard-Ass’ Hogan. Gordy tells his contemporaries how this fellow Lard-Ass receives endless amounts of abuse from family and students at his school. But then he gets ‘the greatest revenge idea a kid ever had’.
The camera takes us to the imagined scene itself, as an announcer calls on contestants for the pie eating competition. Personally, I don’t get why these kind of competitions are held, but then I don’t live in America. And Americans are probably confused by that cheese roll competition we have where somebody rolls a cheese down a hill and competitors chase it and generally end up severely injuring themselves. So fair game. Anyway, when David walks up to the table, he is unceremoniously tripped up and threatened by another competitor and laughed at by the audience. Don’t worry. David will be the one to have the last laugh.
And he takes on those pies like a champ. The announcer advises David to pace himself, but does David pace himself? Does he heck. The crowd start cheering him on, but still refer to him by the derogatory name of Lard-Ass. We cut back to Gordy, who informs his pals that David’s interests didn’t lie in winning the competition, but rather, revenge. Served cold. Or, more likely warm, since those pies were probably warm, but you get the gist. We cut back to David before the competition as he ingests a healthy/unhealthy amount of castor oil, followed by a raw egg. Back in the competition, Gordy’s narration chimes in with David as the latter begins the belch of all belches, ‘like a log truck coming at you at a hundred miles an hour’. Then, the outcome. First, a targeted projectile vomit in the face of the dude who tripped him up, which leads to chain reaction of vomiting from the other contestants, with the smell leading the viewing audience to vomit on each other. And our man David crosses his arms in satisfied victory as he watches the spectacle.
Director Rob Reiner initially had reservations about including the scene, but not because of its gratuitous content. Rather because he didn’t feel it would align with Gordy’s character arc, as he’s shown to grow up to be a great writer. Dozens of blueberry pies were ordered from a local bakery in Brownsville, Oregon for preparation, and Reiner noted how hard he worked on getting the sound of the stomach belch just right, taking inspiration from a drunk character played by actor Jackie Gleeson. The pie filling was apparently a mixture of blueberry and large-curd cottage cheese. Om nom nom…I think not. The vomiting sound effect was initially attempted with a power washer, but finally involved five men pushing down on a large plunger on top of a cylinder to pump out about five gallons of pie which fillied up a vacuum hose through the shirt collar and taped tube of Andy Lindberg – the big man himself. Lindberg remembered how he was covered in so much blueberry that he probably left stains in his hotel room, and received lots of jokes from the presiding extras. But, with art mirroring life, Lindberg got the last laugh as he got to witness the extras vomiting on each other during the very next day of filming. And apparently this art-life mirroring shindig also happened in cinemas showing the film, with one of Lindberg’s friends who worked at a cinema informing him that attendants would have to clean up after almost every showing due to an audience member vomiting. Nice. So nice, in fact, that there’s an annual showing of the film in Brownsville, and even a pie eating contest. The more you know.