Break Like the Wind – On Fart Jokes

When I was in high school I came up with a great way for institutions to deal with flatulence. No longer would there be shame in passing gas, and banished would be the reputation-ruining accusations that killed your chances of getting a girlfriend. Gone would be the standard accusation of “He who smelt it, dealt it,” and the tinny rebuttal of “He who denied it, applied it.”

I explained my idea to my cross country teammate Bob during a training run:
“We should designate a room for farting. Anybody who needed to fart could just go into that room. I’m sure people would be nervous at first – perhaps we could have a boys’ and a girls’ farting room – but eventually it would be as accepted as slipping out to the bathroom.”
“But…who would want to go into that room? It would be pretty stinky…”
Good point. Goodbye, fart room, goodbye, idea, goodbye Nobel Prize.

Fart jokes are surely among the oldest, universal, and most durable humour mankind’s collective funny bone has produced. In a year or two Chuck Norris will be a thing of the past. Blonde jokes are not heard so often anymore, and even racial humour tends to run in cycles.

Not long after I arrived in Slovenia, I was amazed to find this joke in Polet, the supplement to Delo (Slovenia’s highbrow newspaper, for those not in the know):
“Why doesn’t Jamaica play soccer against Columbia? Because the Jamaicans would steal all of the flags, and the Colombians would sniff up all the lines.”
I realize that racist jokes are more publicly appreciated, savoured and regurgitated in Central Europe than elsewhere, but still. I was amazed to read this in the premier newspaper because: 1) How many readers of Polet have ever met a Jamaican or a Columbian? 2) Even the trashiest, funnest, tabloids like Bild in Germany and The Sun do not descend to this level 3) Is it really that funny?

A lot of jokes that run in cycles are fuelled by a desire to look down on others. You can insert the stupid X, for the asinine Y, and the a new series of jokes are born.

Jokes about bad translators fit into this mould. Take the old one about prekmurska gibanica (prekmurske gibanice? Should I use the genitive?) and the hapless translator who turned it into “Over-Mur Running Cake.” Take it, and trash it – that is, please stop telling it to foreigners who do not know Slovenian. You’ll only embarrass yourself because they won’t have a sniff what you’re talking about. Not a knee-slapper, this gibanica joke does let those with a decent knowledge of Slovenian and English laugh at purported dumbness. It may as well be a blonde joke. It can be summed up in the onanistic, back-slapping, “Ain’t we smarter dan dat guy? Ain’t we different from him?”

Fart jokes, in contrast, are necessarily inclusive. Everyone farts.

I don’t know if this couplet qualifies as a joke or a truism, but I like it:

“A belch is but a gentle breeze, coming from the heart.
When it comes out the other end, we call it a fart.”

Back to high school, again. Call me nostalgic. The other class clown once resorted to poetry after a meek girl had given a presentation on the benefits of vegetarianism and a bean-based diet. “Are there any questions or comments?” asked the teacher. He started,

“Beans, beans, good for the heart,
The more you eat, the more you…”

He was sent out of the classroom before he could finish.

That he was booted out before he could ring home the rhyme points to the liminal position of “fart” as a swearword. “Liminal” in academic claptrap means something like “on the edge” or “in-between” (perhaps is-it-a-boy-or-girl “Pat” from Saturday Night Live qualifies as a liminal being). It’s also a stupid word, liminal, I mean. Let’s ban it.

When I was a kid, “fart” was a swearword in my house, but there was plenty of counter-evidence for its four-letter-word status. Some friends were allowed to say it, I’d heard their parents say it, and at least one teacher said it in the classroom. There were even rumours of a Robert Munsch story called “The Fart.” That story was eventually published under the title Good Families Don’t… Too bad he didn’t stick to the original title, since any book he writes is guaranteed to sell a million copies, which would finally establish “fart” as a real word. (Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. How often was that word heard before Gladwell’s book became a bestseller?).

Literature proves that fart jokes are ancient. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written during the 14th century, were on my reading list at university. I recall little of the tales, but I do remember these metres meet or choice lines. A character is out to woo somebody and erroneously believes this would-be lover is on the other side of a window. In fact, he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time because a sweaty bum rather than a “sweete byrd” beckons:

“Speak, sweete byrd, I wat not wher thou art.”
This Nicholas anon let flee a fart,
As gret as it hadde ben a thundir dent…

Let’s see if Chuck Norris jokes are still thundering in six hundred years.

And it wasn’t me; it was Dennis.

Dealt by JB