Noël Godin

Noël Godin (13 September 1945 – 23 August 2026), nicknamed L'Entarteur and Georges le Gloupier, was a Belgian anarchist comedian, writer, critic, actor and notorious pie thrower or entarteur.

His pieing of famous persons started in 1969 with Marguerite Duras and continued throughout his life. His targets included writers, comedians, actors, musicians, audience members, clergymen, presenters, businessmen and politicians. Former minister and future French president Nicolas Sarkozy was pied in 1997, and he hit his most famous target, Bill Gates, in 1998, which increased his notoriety beyond the Francophone world. His favourite and most frequent target was public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose reactions (and Godin's systematic pieings of him) became satirised and ridiculed in the media.

He was described as "the French-speaking world's best-known prankster".

Writing and acting

Godin worked at an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League called Friends of Film. Godin made up most of his articles and made outlandish claims, including that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive. In another, he created a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named "Vivian Pei", describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down. Such claims went unchallenged due to the magazine's very small readership.