Blame It on the Dog (10 page)

As for future jobs requiring professional fart smellers, well, I understand that they’re being outsourced to Third World countries.

A BLAST FROM THE PASTURE

I
t’s official. You can stop badmouthing bovine butt gas.

True, methane molecules and light waves vibrate at the same rate, causing methane to absorb more of the sun’s energy and create about 20 percent of global warming.

True, methane concentrations have more than doubled in the past one hundred years, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that all livestock are responsible for 25 percent of America’s methane emissions.

True, the average cow is responsible for producing about 634 quarts of methane a day.

True, there are about 1.3 billion cows munching vegetation all over the world—more than double the 1970 population—and collectively putting nearly 100 million tons of methane into the atmosphere each year.

But now scientists are claiming that despite a lot of lampoon-tinged news items and cow flatulence jokes over the past decade, the main culprit is burping, not farting. I may have even overstated the problem myself in my mini-chapter “Farts May Be the Death of Mankind” in
Who Cut the Cheese?

According to a June 2003 article in the
Los Angeles Times
, scientists now estimate that 96 percent of cow-generated methane comes from the front end, not the back. Good old Elsie has four stomachs (including a big one that holds forty-two gallons of material) and
a chronic case of indigestion. She’s constantly chewing, digesting, and regurgitating each meal over and over again—and every time she belches, she expels methane, thanks to an intestinal bacterium that converts hydrogen into the heavier gas. Overall, front and back, about 6 percent of a cow’s diet is lost as methane into the air.

Iowa Senator Charles E. Grassley suggested a dozen years ago that all cows should be fitted with anal airbags, complete with catalytic (or cattle-itic) converters, to harness this source of energy. But like everyone else, he was looking at the wrong end. Grassley also suggested that “if that does not work in reducing cow methane gas emissions, we can tax them. Call it another gas tax.”

Well, that’s exactly what politicians tried to do in New Zealand. According to a 2003 BBC report, New Zealand farmers were outraged by a proposed tax on the flatulence and belches coming from their sheep and cattle. This all came about when local scientists estimated that barnyard methane was responsible for more than half of the island country’s greenhouse gases, prompting Prime Minister Helen Clark’s government in Wellington to declare that a tax on ruminant farm animals would help the country meet its gas reduction quotas under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Farts and belches from cows, sheep, goats, and deer, whose multiple stomachs are constantly digesting grasses, may account for only 15 percent of worldwide emissions of methane, but in countries with a large agricultural sector, the proportion is much higher. There are only about four million bipedal, single-stomach New Zealanders, but they own forty-five million sheep, ten million head of cattle, and many other animals, which produce 90 percent of their country’s methane and 40 percent of their total greenhouse emissions. In June 2003, Patrick Goodenough, Pacific Rim Bureau Chief for CNSNews. com, reported that a herd of two hundred head of New Zealand dairy cattle produces enough annual methane gas to drive an average vehicle more than 120,000 miles.

The proposed “fart and belch” tax was expected to raise almost $5 million a year that could be used to fund research into ways of minimizing the effects of agricultural exhalations. However, members of a group called Federated Farmers of New Zealand nearly had a cow when they heard the news. They argued that since the government
had signed the Kyoto agreement on behalf of every citizen, any taxes for research should be borne equally by all. The farmers were also baleful because the proposed levy would make it harder for them to compete against agricultural interests in countries that hadn’t ratified Kyoto, including the United States and Australia.

Buoyed by a September 2003 opinion poll that said 80 percent of their fellow citizens opposed the tax, the Federated Farmers launched a campaign called Fight Against Ridiculous Taxes (FART). A thousand farmers descended on Wellington to stage rallies, collect petition signatures, and deliver a haymaker to Parliament. One farmer even drove his old tractor up the steps of the parliament building. Prime Minister Clark was besieged from all sides, especially the media, which kept coming up with snarky headlines like “Farmers Raise Stink Over Fart Tax” and “Flatulence Tax Just Government Hot Air.” In late October, she backed off and decided to find other ways of meeting the country’s Kyoto obligations. Federated Farmers Vice President Charlie Pedersen announced triumphantly that “farmers will be relieved that the government looks to have finally got the fart tax out of its system.”

Meanwhile, all those cows keep belching. And farting.

A COUPLE OF HOLLYWOOD STINKERS

I
t’s no secret to anyone that Hollywood comedy writers have been coasting on fart gags for twenty-five years now. Young people—especially young guys—are the ones most likely to revisit a movie again and again if they love it, and nothing makes them come back for more like the lingering effects of jokes about farting and crapping in their pants.

So it was no surprise a few years ago that two different low-budget movies called
Fart
came out a few months apart from each other. Actually, one was
Fart: The Movie
(late 2001) and the other was
F.A.R.T. The Movie
(early 2002), and they both went straight to video.

Fart: The Movie
was an hour-and-a-half flick directed by a forty-nine-year-old former network news cameraman named Ray Etheridge. It’s the story of Russell (Joel Weiss), a guy who loves watching television, farting, and his girlfriend Heather (Shannandoah Sorin, who will someday create real problems if she ever becomes a marquee name). Heather is the complication here because she hates it when Russell farts, probably because she knows that if it comes down to a choice between his farts and her, she’ll get blown out the door. She’s also afraid, she tells him, that “if they ever allow farting on television, you’ll never leave the house!” That evening he dozes off in front of the TV, and suddenly everything on the tube is related to flatulence: sitcoms, dramas, commercials, even the news—and here’s where Etheridge’s stable of unknown actors gets to shine. Did I say
unknown
actors? Well, there is one veteran some of you will recognize: an aging Conrad Brooks, who sleepwalked through a couple of 1950s Ed Wood movies, including
Plan
9
from Outer Space
.

F.A.R.T. The Movie
is a little less honest than
Fart: The Movie
in its treatment of breaking wind. Written and directed by Matt Berman, it was originally released theatrically in 2000 under the name
Artie
, starring Seth Walther as an aging frat boy at Buck U. who goes into a fit of gastrointestinal distress every time he gets nervous or excited—a condition that complicates his campus love life.

In the very first scene, a flashback showing baby Artie just after delivery, he lets off a series of meconium-fueled noises, prompting the doctor to tell his parents, “Your son is a farter.” At this point, you may already be complaining that since newborns can’t fart until they’ve accumulated enough bacteria in their intestines, this first scene has destroyed your suspension of disbelief. Maybe if the baby had been just a couple of days older, you’d have bought the movie’s premise hook, line, and stinker.

Having never seen the original
Artie
, I can’t say for certain that this opener was part of the brief theatrical run, but I suspect that it was shot by the distributor that picked up the movie a year and a half later for DVD release, in order to accentuate Artie’s problem. That would fit with the company’s attempt to transform a tame
Animal House
or
Tommy Boy
wannabe into a butt-bang fiesta. First was the title change from
Artie
to
F.A.R.T. The Movie
, even though Artie’s farting never affects the direction of the story or gets him into (or out of) real trouble. The new cover art was a red Whoopee Cushion, and the new taglines were “It’s a real stinker!”—a rare flash of critical honesty—and “This movie is a gas!” Seth Walther’s name was relegated to small print and the spotlight moved to “The Farley Brothers,” Kevin and James (brothers of the late, lamented comic Chris Farley, star of
Tommy Boy
), even though they were second and third bananas with little appeal.

Devon Berube, a self-appointed critic from New Hampshire, said it best in his Internet Movie Database (
http://imdb.com
) review: “Basically this is a really bad college movie that attempts to use fart jokes to staple everything together.… It’s like someone threw a bunch of ideas into the air and filmed the ones that landed in the circle on
the floor.” Another contributing voice, Cameron Scharnberg from Adelaide, Australia, was equally unimpressed: “This movie is an absolute pile of crap.… I didn’t laugh once, which doesn’t happen very often because I have a pretty immature sense of humour.” And a reviewer named Chinpokêmon complained because “
F.A.R.T. The Movie
does not meet with the fart joke quota one would expect from both the movie’s title and premise. It instead is a tame romantic comedy with a few fart jokes thrown in.”

So what prompted Spectrum Films of Mesa, Arizona, to repackage a bad frat house romp as an even worse fart frolic? Could it have been simply “farts for farts’ sake”? In a
Los Angeles Times
feature that ran on September 10, 2000, film director Reginald Hudlin (half of the Hudlin Brothers, known best for their
House Party
movies) announced that flatulence was still the funniest thing in Hollywood. “Broad comedy is safer because there’s a greater margin for error,” he said. “Even bad fart jokes get a chuckle.”

Only a couple of weeks earlier,
Variety
editor Peter Bart had written, “Today, there’s growing evidence that the fart jokes are driving out legitimate comedy.”

And earlier that year, at the seventy-second Academy Awards ceremonies on March 27, the event’s producer, Richard Zanuck, got ABC’s approval for comic Robin Williams to sing the word “fart” when he performed an Oscar-nominated song, “Blame Canada,” from the film
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
.

Given all that, why not green-light movies like
F.A.R.T. The Movie
and
Fart: The Movie?

An old Jewish expression says you can’t shine shit. You can’t shine farts either—but that won’t stop Hollywood from trying.

FEETS, DON’T FART AT ME NOW!

I
n my chapter on Hollywood (“Gone with the Wind”) in
Who Cut the Cheese?
I credited Mel Brooks’s 1974 Western parody,
Blazing Saddles
, with being the first mainstream American film with a fart joke. But after revisiting Jerry Lewis’s
The Nutty Professor
from 1963, I have to revise my cinematic history. In one scene, as Lewis’s title character, nerdy Julius Kelp, sneaks into a college lab, his shoes seem to be making suction noises on the tile floor that sound like wet farts. To avoid discovery he takes them off, but as he continues to tiptoe forward in his socks, you can still hear those crepe-sole crepitations, prompting Lewis to give the camera a dumbfounded double take. (Before we declare Lewis
le comique genius
, however, let me remind you that England’s famous
Goon Show
comedian, Spike Milligan, used this same gag in a British film called
Postman’s Knock
a year earlier.)