Blame It on the Dog (5 page)

I
n 2003, the Nickelodeon cable TV channel’s Kids’ Choice Awards show added a new category, “Favorite Fart in a Movie,” even though films had to have at least a relatively kid-friendly PG rating in order to qualify for entry. From early March to April 3 of that year, seventeen million kids voted at
Nick.com
’s ballot page.

Finally the big night—April 15—arrived for the sixteenth annual Kids’ Choice Awards, airing live from the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA in Los Angeles.

“And the nominees are …” said presenter Ashton Kutcher:
“Austin Powers 3
,
Master of Disguise, Crocodile Hunter, Scooby Doo
.”

“And the winner is …” (dramatic opening of envelope; breaths bated all over America; asses clenched in the audience for fear of upstaging the winner)
“Scooby Doo!”

Suddenly the award show’s producer inexplicably cut to a reaction shot of TV twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sitting in the audience, which fed all sorts of speculation and created a stink in its own right, but we’re not concerned with that here. If the Olsen twins want coverage in this book, they’ll have to come up with their own farts—in stereo.

Anyway,
Scooby Doo
was Warner Bros.’s $51-million remake of a popular 1970s TV series from Hanna-Barbera, an animation company known for its barely moving cartoon characters. For the new Hollywood version, real actors stepped into all the roles except
for the eponymous Scooby Doo, a talking Great Dane re-created by computer graphics (CG) technology. In the award-winning scene, the dog got into a farting bout with Shaggy, his goofy human companion played by Matthew Lillard. (Lillard had already given the Hollywood press the
Scooby Doo
poop scoop before the movie’s June 2002 release when he announced, “Scooby and I actually get into a farting contest. Your kids are gonna love this.”) Since Scooby was unavailable for the Nickelodeon event, Lillard ran up onstage alone to accept the award, an orange blimp called the Blimpy—an unwieldy representation of a flying gas bag presented to all Kids’ Choice winners, but certainly most appropriate for Favorite Fart.

Pop culture observers who watched the event weren’t sure what a farting prize portended for the film industry. “It’s a sad movie indeed that tries to offer many funny sequences but only delivers one, and when that sequence is an immature farting competition between a man and a dog, that’s when you realize just how unfunny the rest of [
Scooby Doo
] actually is,” said online critic Mark Dujsik.

But Hollywood didn’t care. The Kids’ Choice Awards happens to be one of the loosest and hippest of the countless awards shows that clog TV schedules early each year. Along with the presentation of the fart blimp, there’s a celebrity burping contest whose past winners include Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, and Hugh Jackman. And these A-listers are all happy to do it. According to Nickelodeon president Cyma Zarghami, the willingness of celebrities to join the juvenile hijinks is “a testament to how powerful the kids’ audience is. This segment [of moviegoers] is really important to the box office.” Also, as any ad exec will tell you, it’s wise even for actors to establish brand identification early and build a lifelong relationship with consumers.

The following year, on April 3, 2004, the winner of the Blimpy for Favorite Fart in a Movie was
Kangaroo Jack
, again a Warner Bros, movie with a CG character in the lead. This time the award-winning scene, which lasted about a minute, involved two crepitating camels and one of the film’s flesh-and-blood stars, Anthony Anderson, who retorted with a camel-worthy fart of his own. The drafty dromedaries must have been off making another movie during the
awards, because only Anderson showed up to accept the accolades of a grateful public.

Again, it was a case of kids overruling the critics, who were generally not kind to
Kangaroo Jack
. “Apparently, [the camels’] frequent farting struck someone on the screenwriting team … as absolutely hilarious, and so the joke is allotted several minutes (which feel longer),” said PopMatters (
http://popmatters.com
) reviewer Cynthia Fuchs. “By the time the punch line comes, the joke is past expiration.… And matching [Anderson’s] bodily functions with those of the ostensibly horrific camels only underlines the film’s view of [his character, Louis] as the physical joke butt.”

Warner Bros. loved the bad press, however, and took a cue from Nickelodeon; when it released
Kangaroo Jack
on DVD, one of the extras was a featurette called “Behind the Gas,” with sound engineer Stevie “Bud” Johnson explaining how he and his assistant came up with “the pure sound we were looking for.” According to Johnson, they experimented with a Whoopee Cushion, a Fart Machine, a large Mexican take-out meal, the old hand-in-the-armpit trick, and even the reliable razz using their lips and tongues, but they never revealed exactly what combination they used to create camel farts.

The studio also made sure that when Matthew Lillard returned in
Scooby Doo
2, he delivered a spectacular, well-choreographed fart dance. Speaking about it to Eric S. Elkins at UnderGroundOnline (
http://ugo.com/ugo
) in June 2004, Lillard said, “I remember the night before [the scene], in my underwear, I posed in front of the full-length mirror, and … you also realize, I’ve done Shakespeare, and here [I am] doing this fart dance.”
Hark! What wind through yonder buttocks breaks?

Unfortunately, at the eighteenth annual Kids’ Choice Awards in 2005, Lillard had to sit on those buttocks all through the show because there was no longer any Favorite Fart Blimpy. Though apparently no parents or religious groups complained publicly about all the body noises, Nickelodeon decided to play it safe and not tempt fate in these dark, perilous times.

Or perhaps the network simply didn’t want to reduce the American fart award to its Swedish counterpart. In November
2004, at a separate version of the Kids’ Choice Awards airing from Stockholm, a plurality of 100,000 young voters inexplicably chose an exploding underwater mine in
Finding Nemo
as Favorite Fart in a Movie.

Or maybe, as comic Al Franken predicted a decade ago, the government has simply installed a universal “F-chip” to block out all farting on television.

THE FARTING FEMMES OF NON-VIRTUOUS REALITY

T
he trendiest fetish in porno right now is girls farting on your computer. A recent Googling of the term “girls who fart” brought up 1,790 sites on the Internet. “Women who fart” revealed another 1,350, including one specialty-item page called “women who fart into cakes.” (Don’t ask.) “Farting women” added yet another 1,800. One website features Lizz, a self-proclaimed Queen of Farts (
http://queenoffarts.com
) who invites visitors to hear and watch her letting barbecued-bean farts, thundering toilet bowl farts, burbling bathtub farts, even poofed-up-pajamas farts—all caught on live cams and videos. Lizz also features a page of letters from her mostly male club members rhapsodizing about female cheezers they’ve smelled, heard, or dreamt about.

“I think the most exciting thing men like to see is the sheer embarrassment a woman feels when she accidentally lets one go,” says Liz P., Queen Lizz herself, who lives in the San Francisco area. “Or they get excited by seeing just the opposite—a confident woman like me purposely ripping one out for everyone to enjoy. But then you have the fetish guy who associates a woman’s farts with face sitting. These men … take genuine pleasure in being dominated, treated like a seat cushion, and being smothered by their queen. And hopefully humiliated and forced to receive her royal perfume.”

But normally, Ms. P.’s butt-gas business is a little more prosaic. “Believe it or not, the most common requests are for very casual and
natural farts, where I am fully clothed,” she says. “In all honesty, most of my members don’t want to see my naked body at all. It’s not the human form that turns them on, but rather the act of farting itself in an everyday situation. If a woman is at work and has to let one go, would she run outside and take all her clothes off and announce her fart? No, she would secretly go to a quiet, secluded corner, slowly let the gas escape, and hope no one hears. Or she would fart accidentally and excuse herself politely. And that is exactly what my ‘fart guys’ want to see. Like a forbidden act they were not supposed to witness.”

She occasionally gets requests that seem odd even to her. “One guy actually asked me to capture a fly, put it in a jar, fart in the jar, then close the lid tightly. Is that crazy, or what? And one guy asked me to fart in a coffee cup, then quickly bring it to my nose so I could smell it. Of course, I always get the good ol’ ‘fart in the tub’ requests, and ‘fart on a hard surface.’ I guess the farts can be better heard that way.”

There’s also a legion of Internet mail-order companies offering videos of pretty girls blasting or fizzling into each other’s faces, or into the faces of hapless (lucky?) guys. Perhaps the Wal-Mart of wall-to-wall farts is FTC Original Videos, a Japanese company whose movies include
Girls Be Farting, My Sweet Farts
, and
Take Farts Oneself
—garbled Japanese English for “let them fart on you.” The nubile Nipponese nymphs dress in school uniforms, with white socks and matching white cotton panties that, with luck, stay that way. “Three new girls show her [sic] good farts in this video,” according to one ad. “Every Girls [sic] farts are loud and smelly. Pretty faces when fart in video.” FTC also has the
Farting Iron Woman
series, starring various airy Amazons. One, Marina Suzuki, boasts, “My farts is greatest!” Another, Ruka Ichinomiya, claims her diet of “bulbs”—garlic—makes her flatulence especially piquant. (See http://bekkoame.ne.jp/ha/dins/onarafetish3english.htm.)

Then there’s the American video
Foul Wind: A Face Fart Fiesta
(
http://foulwind.com
), which features guys and girls equally poking their butts in each other’s faces, letting go with windy wallops, and then laughing about it. I must confess that I appear briefly in this video, but only as a voice of temperance and reason, in hopes that
when viewers at home try farting into the faces of their significant others, they don’t overdo it.

Much of the power of all this feminine butt-fluttering is the reluctance of most women to admit they actually do it. If only they knew that a lusty fart might attract
more
men. Not just lowlife pervs, either. James Joyce based his novel
Ulysses
—considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest—on the day in Dublin he met his wife, Nora Barnacle, whose bodily functions transfixed him. “You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole,” Joyce wrote in a private letter. “It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.”

In others words, Joyce wanted to take farts oneself.

Though we lack other mammals’ hypersensitivity to the smells of sex and territorial marking (otherwise, how could we live together in urban environments?), scientists have assured us for years that pheromones—primal scents hidden within everyone’s body odors—still guide our sexual behavior. And now we know that thanks to the “stimulus response,” or “conditioned reflex,” that Dr. Ivan Pavlov illuminated nearly a hundred years ago, even the
sound
of a virtual fart, without the stink, has potent sexual powers.

Seventeenth-century English poet Samuel Butler perhaps said it best in a poem called “Hudibras” (circa 1664), about a young man named Whachum who composed odes to everything, including his girlfriend’s various eructations: “And, when imprison’d air escap’d her / It puft him up with poetic rapture.”

SPONGEBUTT FARTYPANTS