By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / September 24, 2026
“Entartons les pompeux cornichons!”
(”Let’s pie the pompous windbags!“)
—Noël Godin (1945-2026)
”Some people paint. Others make films or sculptures,“ National Public Radio presenter Joel Rose reported last month on All Things Considered. ”Noël Godin’s medium was cream pies, and his canvas … the human face.“
Godin died August 23, 2026, at the age of 80. He was a Belgian anarchist, actor, and social commentator, but he was best known for his entartage, or cream pie throwing, in the great tradition of late nineteenth century English music hall farce and Mack Sennett’s early twentieth century silent film slapstick masterpieces.
Under the nom de guerre Georges le Gloupier or L’Entarteur, the Belgian meringue-throwing marksman terrorized capitalists and politicians as well as pompous pseudo-intellectuals with some two dozen tart attacks over half a century. Through it all, in his words, ”I have always remained true to the spirit of May ’68. I still live for that time and have always advocated direct sabotage, the sabotage of the professions, the sabotage of the roles into which we are trapped by our day-to-day boredom.“
His first pie targeted well-known French author Marguerite Duras in November 1967 and was launched one month after my own first (and last) foray into tartist terrorism. On October 14, 1969, I delivered a perfectly pitched cream-filled “Yip Pie” into the face of former UC Berkeley president Clark Kerr as Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin spoke to a large anti-Vietnam War rally on the Indiana University Bloomington campus less than two blocks away. Jerry had been a UC Berkeley student activist in 1964 when Kerr presided over mass arrests of free speech and anti-war protesters, and that ”cosmic convergence“ provided our ad hoc conspiratorial committee a rich, and somewhat cannabis inspired, context to put some GRRRRRR! into guerrilla theatre. The resulting action—brilliant (if I may say so) though widely misunderstood by those unversed in “dada dialectics”—made headlines across the United States and Europe.
SIDE NOTE: Journalist Rex Weiner erroneously wrote in The Paris Review in 2014 that his “buddy” and notorious counterculture chameleon Tom Forcade tossed “the first known instance of pastry as a political weapon”—at an obscenity and pornography commission hearing in Washington D.C. on May 13, 1970. In fact, the entartment seven months earlier of Dr. Kerr, then employed as a CIA-funded authority on student pacification, was the first launch of cream pastry as a new mise-en-scène of anti-authoritarian political theatre.
From November 1969 until his death, Godin and his International Patisserie Brigade (IPB)—marching behind their vaunted war-cry, “Gloop! Gloop! Gloop!”—pied more than two dozen big shits—from Bill Gates (Brussels, 1998) and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (1997) to self-proclaimed “most gifted writer of my generation” Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was “entarted” eight times by Godin’s indefatigable pie posse. Lévy apparently possessed a special brand of puffed-up pomposity that made him the perfect prey for puff pastry.
To show that he was not beholden to notions of ideological purity, Monsieur le Gloupier even glopped renowned leftist filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. As the perp later recalled, Godard paused, “took out his cigar, and slowly began licking the cream off.” And then the legendary auteur praised the spectacle as “an homage to silent film’’—and gave Mr. Godin a guest pass for the entire festival.
According to the September 7, 2026, obituary published by The New York Times, Godin “viewed his life’s work as a series of miniature blockbusters. ‘Pastry attacks are made like films,’ he said in 2022. ‘Except that their main protagonists don’t know that they are playing in it.’”
In addition to the Keystone Kops, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges, Godin credited the Yippies as a major role in his own prankish inspiration. Despite differences—he described himself as an “anarcho-confectionist” while I lean into Marxism of both Karl and Groucho variety)—I always considered Monsieur le Gloupier a much more authentic standard-bearer for absurdist anti-authoritarian flan chicanery than copy-cat pastry self-promoters such as Forcade and Aron (the Pie Man) Kay, who did what Godin resolutely stated was “unthinkable”—i.e., sell “contracts” like a Mafia hitman.
I was, as they say in show biz, a one-hit wonder. What my Yippie compadres and I staged in that Indiana University lecture hall in 1969 was a one-off guerrilla theatre performance, the denouement of a historic ”convergence“ (Kerr vs Rubin) and a teachable moment about authoritarianism (at least so it seemed as the bong made the first few rounds). But I never intended to make a career out of food fighting against the ruling class.
What Godin and his merry gloopsters did, however—in addition to tossing lots of sweet tarts in the service of democracy—was to inspire a generation of underground freedom-fighting guerrilla pâtissiers (most notably San Francisco’s Biotic Baking Brigade, the Taart Movement in the Netherlands, and Les Entartistes of Montreal) to continue to strike terror in the minds and egos of narcissistic oligarchs while bringing some comic relief to the grim task of class war.
(According to The Daily Beast, “fixer” Michael Cohen told a 2023 New York grand jury that Donald Trump’s now-much-analyzed sleepless nights full of unhinged social media rants are the direct result of a recurring nightmare in which stealth-targeted meringue sploshes his coif before slathering down onto his over-stuffed shirt.)
But, alas, while half-baked autocrats may tremble, we must not forget that Mr. Godin’s legacy also includes a sticky trail of freelancers—pied pipers, if you will—in need of bail money.
Entarton!
[James Retherford is an Austin-based writer, graphic designer, and political activist, and an occasional contributor to The Rag Blog. Jim, who was active in SDS, the Yippies, and political guerrilla theater, was a founder and editor of underground newspaper The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, and was the ghost writer for Jerry Rubin’s iconic book, Do It! Find Jim’s work at Hot Digital Dog Design in Austin.]
