If this were $25,000 Pyramid, you’d offer: “Sporting events. Denny’s. School parking lots. Taco shops. Taco shops filled with drag queens.” We’d answer: “Places where it’s socially acceptable to have a fist fight.” Then Dick Clark would run into the picture and present you with some prizes.

Chuck E. Cheese? That’s not okay. That’s not excusable. That’s not socially acceptable.

Tell that to two Massachusetts men who pleaded not guilty in a Framingham District Court after Natick Police said they started a fight during a child’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese on Saturday.

The Metrowest Daily News has more on the cause of the scuffle:

Judge Douglas Stoddart asked the men, “Isn’t Chuck E. Cheese a fight-free zone?” Not in 2011 it ain’t, Judge. In 2011, we fight everywhere, whether it’s socially acceptable or not.

But Natick’s isn’t the only Chuck E. Cheese with modified fight club. The Wall Street Journal in 2008 documented a rash of brawls, melees and disturbances throughout the country: In Brookfield, Wisconsin, officers broke up 12 fights between January 2007 and December 2008 — one fight involved 40 people. The police department in Susquehanna Township, Pennsylvania, “gets called to respond to disputes at the restaurant as many as 15 times a year.” The WSJ also found an incident in Toledo, Ohio, where four women were charged with disorderly conduct after a melee erupted at a Chuck E. Cheese’s there. And perhaps humanity at its finest: “A man arrested at a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Chuck E. Cheese after police said he ‘ran around the restaurant spitting and yelling he had hepatitis C.’”

If Chuck E. Cheese is “Where a kid can be a kid,” then it’s also where a jerk can be a jerk.

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