Dawson - Who cut the cheese?: a cultural history of the fart

Copyright 1999 by Jim Dawson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Detail from Thirty-Six Faces of Expression, by Louis Boilly.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the publisher.

eISBN: 978-0-307-77878-9

v3.1

Alas!
This book of gas
has come to pass:
Who Cut the Cheese?

Haiku

CONTENTS

1 ALL GODS CHILDREN GOTTA FART
If farting is sinful, why is it so good for you?

2 THE FART
Will the common household flatus vulgaris please stand up?

3 WORDS ARE BUT WIND
What do all those words mean, and where did they come from?

4 LE PETOMANE: THE FINE ART OF FARTING
Would you pay to see a man whistle a tune with his asshole?

5 LIT. FARTS
Did Shakespeare, Dante, Balzac, and the rest of them really say that?

6 A SWIFT KICK IN CUPIDS ASS
Who says beautiful women dont fart like the rest of us?

7 MEN OF LETTERS
Mark Twain and Ben Franklin spell F-A-R-T!

8 RELIGIOUS FARTS
What did Jesus really mean when He said, Get thee behind me, Satan?

9 MUSICAL FARTS
Yeah, they sound lovely, but where do you put the microphone?

10 GONE WITH THE WIND
Hollywoods farts: theyre rich, theyre famous, and theyre living your dreams!

11 ADVENTURES
OF FARTMAN
Is Howard Stern Americas favorite asshole?

12 FUN WITH FARTS
Todays gag items are actually designed to make you gag!

13 LEGENDS OF THE FART
Do you have Prince Albert in a can, or Abe Lincoln in a bottle?

APPENDIX:
SOMEBODY STEPPED ON A DIGITAL DUCK
In the ether of cyberspace nobody can hear you fartor can they?

Thanks to Hal Ackerman, Robin Banks, Ray Baxter, Adam & Kathy Birket, Marc Bland, Eddie Brandt, Ray Campi, Romeo T. Carey, Solis Cooperson, Doctor Demento (Barret Hansen), Martin Devane, J. T. Doggett, Jacquelene Edwards, Art & Jennifer Fein, Susan Fogely, Sam Frank, Mikal Gilmore, Diane Heller, Skip Heller, Manuel & Carmen Jimenez, Kate Karp, Tommy Lamey, Allen Larman, Johnny Legend, Golden Bill Liebowitz, Jackie Jokeman Martling, Harry Narunsky, Opel & Ellen Nations, Alice Nichols, Joy Nolan, Lyn Nystrom, Michael Ochs, Kendall Overlid, Howard J. Patterson, Lew Pipes, Guy Pohlman, Hallie & Olivia Pootwell, Eric Predoehl, Steve Propes, Omid Rahmanian, my editor Jason Rath, Ray Regalado, Eric Reinhalter, Jeff Riley, Lew Sleeman, John Sneddon, Pat Stutsman, John Waters, my agent Frank Weimann, Ian Whitcomb, Bill Womack, and the many fine folks at the Central Los Angeles Library and the Hollywood Library for the assistance they gave to this project.

If anyone has a good fart fact, fart story or fart joke that can be added to a future edition of this book, please send it to The Gasworks at 1608 N. Cahuenga Boulevard #442, Hollywood, CA 90028.

For those reviewers who cant find words to describe this book, you have my permission to use any of the blurbs below. But please, only one blurb per reviewer.

The publisher has a real stinker on its hands!

Dawson has exhausted his subject!

The author shouldve kept this book on the back burner!

A pocket of methane within the bowels of the publishing industry!

Certainly one book I dont plan to bury my nose in!

Should keep the Literary Establishment fuming!

As a cheesy writer, Dawson doesnt quite cut it!

Breaks no new ground but !

Waitll the public gets wind of this book!

A chronicle of life on the cutting-cheese edge!

The question people ask me the most is, What made you want to write a book about farts? Well, as with most inspirations and wild ideas, it just bubbled up into consciousness one evening.

I was sitting in the bathtub at the time.

Why, I wondered, were farts so damned funny? It wasnt just me. Guys always seemed to be making light of them, or actually lighting them, or letting them at inappropriate times. It was a revelation when, during my first college reading of Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales in the late 1960s, I stumbled upon the elaborate fart jokes he created 600 years ago. About that same time I was introduced to that august collection of tomes, the Oxford English Dictionary, an anal-retentive etymologists delight. Looking up the word fart (along with a couple of other equally disreputable words), I was surprised to discover not only the numerous examples of how the word has fared over the centuries, but also how painstakingly the editors dwelled on them. My direction in life was set: Someday I would write a fart bookno, not just a fart book, the fart bookso definitive that millions of people would throw all their other fart books away.

To tell you the truth, I have no recollection of ever passing gas as a child. I dont even remember if my family had a pet name for farting. But I must have done it, because I remember being afraidbeing very afraidof letting one slip in church during my gut-wrenching stint as an altar boy, armed with a noisy bronze candle lighter/snuffer, sitting conspicuously in the first row, in front of God and everybody, and keenly aware that the hard, wooden pews had a way of trumpeting every thump and clatter like a bullhorn.

My three most memorable farts occurred after I had become an adult and should have known better. The first one was easily the funniest. I was stationed at an infantry training base near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and was fond of spending my evenings at the taverns outside the gate, on Route 17, flirting with Asian barmaids, drinking cheap Falstaff beer, and eating pickled eggs out of the type of jars that circuses once reserved for two-headed babies. One morning, after a particularly rough night, I walked into the C.O.s outer office, let off a silent but deadly, and hurried out again. Within moments I heard a barrage of choking and angry shouts, as if the office staff had been hit by a tear gas canister. I laughed about that for months.

The second fart happened in Cape May, New Jersey, while I was walking down a narrow side street with my friend Mike McHenry. I blasted a roaring number that must have created a bubble in the seat of my pants, if not an outright brown stain. Suddenly a twinge of paranoia made me glance over my shoulder. Not more than six feet behind us were two young, attractive girls who only moments before had stepped out of a doorway and into our wake. I was quick-witted enough to glare accusingly at Mike and call him a rotten bastard, but I still turned red with embarrassmentand, as you can see, that moment haunts me even now. I wonder if the two girls remember it.

FART HUMOR

The drawback with fart humor, says humorist Garrison Keillor, is that its improvisational by nature, and it loses a lot in the telling. You had to be there!