Michael S. King is a writer I met doing “Big News.” He is NOT Michael Patrick King, the writer/director of “Sex and the City.”
Michael Patrick King is funny, famous and gay.
Michael S. King is funny, infamous and what happens during undergrad doesn’t count.
The pork pie hat got its name for looking like a real pork pie and thus may have paved the way to making it okay for Carmen Miranda to walk around with food on her head.
I should note that I’ve never seen an actual pork pie, nor any other kind of pie that came with a brim, so I’m taking someone’s word here.
The coolest thing about pork pie hats is probably the people who have worn them: Dean Martin, Robert “Opie” Oppenheimer, Ed Brubaker, Robert Crumb and, best of all, Buster Keaton, who actually made his own pork pie hats!
This is so cool I have to share the following bit of Keaton lore. In 1964, he told an interviewer at the Movieland Wax Museum how he made them.
“I took a good Stetson and cut it down, then I stiffened the brim with sugar water. My recipe calls for three heaping teaspoons of granulated sugar in a teacup of warm water. You wet the top and bottom of the brim, and then smooth it out on a clean, hard surface and let it dry to a good stiffness.”
Eleanor Keaton said that when she made Buster’s porkpie hats, she used gray fedoras.
I’ve known a few comedians and I’d be surprised if most of them knew how to make their own breakfasts, let alone their own hats.
(On the other hand, if I ever needed a hand-crafted bong on the fly…)
I guess that’s the zen of the pork pie. It’s made cool by the wearer, not the other way around. It’s a modest workman’s hat, low, flat, good for stashing a guitar pick or a cigarette, maybe the occasional ace card in the back. And if you need to punch out a window pane without cutting your hand?
It is the pork pie and no other.
What a shame they are considered “unclean” in Muslim countries!
Finally, the best thing about pork pie hats: You never see them on surly, unshaven lip-synchers at the Country Music Awards.

Two down.
Next up: Taco Sauce as a Form of Torture (dedicated to Jenni Powell’s ex-boyfriend).