July 15, 2005

Whoever smelt it...

"Foop! is funny the way the kid in the back of 3rd grade making fart noises with his armpits was funny."

I usually don't comment on Amazon customer reviews, but I wanted to mention this recent one because it got me thinking about fart jokes. You might not be able to tell from the above quote, but the reviewer didn't think too highly of my book.

I must admit that it's hard for me to take this sort of comment as criticism because when I close my eyes and think about some little goofy kid sitting in the back of the class making fart noises with his armpit, I chuckle a bit to myself. I can't help it. I think kids do some of the funniest stuff I've ever seen, and adults who remember what it was like to be a kid are some of my favorite comedians, filmmakers, artists, and writers.

I was a high school Algebra teacher once…briefly. I taught freshman. One day a few students were standing around my desk while I explained some equation or something, while the 20 or so other students finished a quiz or some other bullshit work I gave them to shut them up. One of the students by my desk suddenly smacked one of those huge sticky lizard novelty things across my desk. I was caught off guard and didn’t know what it was at first, so I said the absolute worst thing a high school teacher could ever possibly say. I said, loudly, “What the fuck is that?”

Did I mention I taught in a Catholic school? I did.

And of course THE ENTIRE class heard me. They could have been miles away, in a basement, with headphones on and heavy metal blasting and they STILL would have heard me. Its like kids have a separate set of ears for hearing when adults say fuck.

To make matters worse, after I said it, in that brief moment when there was complete silence in the classroom as the kids tried to compute what they just heard, I started to laugh. I laughed at my F bomb because a teacher saying “What the fuck is that?” to a bunch of 14 year olds is funny. The kids knew it, I knew it, and there was nothing we could do to stop laughing about it

Now, I obviously didn’t last long as a teacher, but that’s not the point. The point is that things we’re not supposed to do are often incredibly funny.

So let's be honest with ourselves... farting is funny. When you're sitting around at Thanksgiving dinner and grandpa lets one rip, it's incredibily hard not to at least smirk. I mean, come on. Grandpa's anal opening just vibrated (violently) as a bubble of gas poofed out into the world. Get that stick out of your ass and laugh dammit!

The thing is, so-called "potty" humor wouldn't exist if people weren't so damned uptight about their farting and bathroom habits. People fart, on average, 14 times a day. I know this because I checked the official Facts on Farts site. That's a lot of farting. You'd think we'd have accepted it as a totally natural and common part of the human condition by now, but oh no.

I just don't see what the big deal is about throwing in a fart, pee, or poop references every now and then. We spend more time doing those things than we do telling people that we love them. Hell, even Samuel Beckett made occasional fart jokes. One of Beckett's friends once said to him, quite seriously:

"You sit there saying nothing while the world is going to pieces! What do you want! What do you want to do?"

To which Beckett replied:

"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."

There's also this excellent sentence from Beckett’s wonderful novel Watt:

Watt's smile was further peculiar in this, that it seldom came singly, but was followed after a short time by another, less pronounced it's true. In this it resembled the fart.

It's like people can't stand to be reminded that a couple times a day they pull down their pants and underwear, sit on a big bowl of water, and excrete some serious filth. Just look at the toilet paper section of your local supermarket. What's on most of the packages? Adorable little babies!

How bizarre is that? There's an infant's face on a package of something you're going to wipe your ass with. The underlining message here is: "Charmin: the next best thing to wiping your ass with a baby's smooth, soft cheek."

It's like the family who keeps their retarded son locked up in the basement and then gets mad whenever he makes a ruckus. The same goes for jerking off, it's another one of those things that people aren't supposed to do, but dear lord do they ever.

This all reminds me of a book about the history and behaviors of New York City Rats that I just read. The thing that stuck me the most is the way that most people look at rats as something less than animals. They're vermin who need to be poisoned into oblivion. But no one seems to realize that the rats are here and they thrive in our cities for one reason: because humans produce an endless stream of waste that rats survive on. Maybe that's why people are disgusted by rats so much. Because they're living proof of how disgusting WE are.

I've decided that my spirit animal is a rat. If it isn't, then I wish a rat would kill whatever my spirit animal currently is and take its place as my guide. Because rats, like fart jokes, are survivors. They've been with us for thousands of years (I can totally see a Neanderthal grunting to another Neanderthal to pull his finger), and they'll never go away. They are a constant reminder that we're not as squeaky clean and holy as we wish we were. We're not angels, we're animals.

So, the armpit Amazon review...I take it as a complement. Foop! is not, by any means, just a bunch of fart jokes strung together into a novel. It just seems that some people are fixating on the few that are in there. It's like you say the word "fart" and some people automatically tune out everything else you're trying to say because you mentioned the-bodily-function-which-must-not-be-named.

OK, enough of this. I’m off to go sit on my ass and fart and think about rats.

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