The Big Read: Waiting for Godin

Whatever happened to Noel Godin? If ever the world needed Noel Godin it's right now.

But like some lame Superman in a lame Superman reboot movie that no one needed or wanted to see, he has withdrawn to his Belgian fortress of solitude and left us in a world ever more overrun with the humourless and the pompous and the grasping, a world of Sanrals and Srinivasans, elderly Twitter trolls and Australian shark cullers.

It was February 4 1998, 16 years ago this week, that Noel Godin hit Bill Gates in the face with a cream pie and surrendered to the authorities, saying" "My work here is done." No! Mais non, m'sieur! Your work here was just beginning.

Godin is a writer, critic, actor and freelance pie-thrower who calls himself l'Entarteur - "The Encaker", which is as good a superhero name as any I've heard - and also, somewhat less ominously, George le Gloupier. He and followers execute their unexpected pie deliveries while grinning comically and shouting "Gloup! Gloup! Gloup!" At one point their ambitious plans included caking Tony Blair, pie-bombing the Popemobile, carpet-spattering the football World Cup final with cream-and-custard baked goods from a helicopter, and podium-pieing the winner of the Tour de France.

The idea is to use pudding to puncture the posing and pretension of the powerful, and it all seems a little silly until you see that photo of Bill Gates looking forlorn and faceless and frosted with whipped cream and you realise what a pure pleasure it is to see the bubble of power being pricked, however childishly, and perhaps especially when it's childishly.

Seeing power and pomposity take a pie to the face is the soul of comedy. It's the purest and most joyful celebration of the powerless making themselves heard in the deaf and indifferent halls of the powerful. Dignity is offended - good! Puffed-up dignity should be offended more often - but no one gets hurt. "Look!" says the flung pie. "You have money and influence but you're still human like the rest of them."

There are many pie activists around the world. A unit called the Biotic Baking Brigade has struck at conservative Fox News pundits and at the head of those hallelujah-wielding human-haters, the Westboro Baptist Church. A Canadian group called Les Entartistes has pelted politicians and environmental polluters and, for good measure, Sylvester Stallone at the opening of a Planet Hollywood in Montreal. Godin's autobiography is called Cream and Punishment; there's a pie-throwing splinter group in the US called Al-Pieda: these two facts alone give me hope for the world.

But why, I wondered, are there no local pie provocateurs? Surely we have plenty of walking face-pastry magnets around these parts? And then I thought - why not do it myself? I'm always looking for a hobby, and that would get me out of the house. I floated the idea past a couple of friends. They were enthusiastic, as people often are before they realise they'll be expected to help. With whom would I start, they wondered?

"What about Jacob Zuma?" I offered. To be honest, my pie-throwing juices don't really flow for No1, but JZ is generally a crowd-pleaser and a consensus-builder. If you want people to click on your link or laugh at your cartoon or nod in agreement at whatever point you happen to be making, some gratuitous Zuma abuse generally takes you over the line. But there was a silence.

"I don't know," said someone. "Do you really want to be the white boy who assaulted the black democratically elected president with a weapon?"

"It's not really a weapon," I said. "It's more of a comestible."

But I realised they had a point. I dream - don't we all? - that the day will come when a white South African can hit a black South African with a pie without the moment being racially charged, but that day is not yet here.

"What about Helen Zille?" someone suggested. "If you pie JZ and Helen on the same day it might look more even-handed."

I explained that Helen Zille doesn't have power. A thrown pie is funny only if it travels uphill.

"Anyway," said someone else, "a man assaulting a woman isn't exactly a barrel of laughs."

And although I did point out that Noel Godin pied writer Marguerite Duras in 1969, those, we agreed, were simpler times.

But where does that leave me? Assuming I don't want to drive out to Somerset West and pie the elderly, the only targets I have left are white men more or less my age, and I'm damned if I'll spend the rest of my life stalking Steve Hofmeyr with armfuls of banoffees and melktert and lemon meringues.

Come back, Noel Godin, we need you. You're Belgian, which is close enough to French. The French can get away with anything.