Breaking ground by breaking wind: The first audible fart in cinema history
There are actors, comedians, and performers who’ve built their entire careers and livelihoods around fart jokes, but somebody had to get there first. It takes a true cinematic titan to take the plunge, pass gas on-screen and carve out hallowed ground for others to follow, and it happened a lot later than some may think.
Of course, the fart joke has been a staple of humour for centuries, whether it’s Ben Jonson’s 1610 comedy The Alchemist containing the line “I fart at thee!” James Joyce reflects on the “seated calm above his own rising smell” in Ulysses, or acknowledgements of bodily functions in the works of Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many more. The point is, some of the greatest literary minds in history have never been above the humble fart gag, but cinema remained awfully prudish for the longest time.
Legendary farter – which, yes, is an accolade and a very worthy one at that – Joseph Pujol tore the house down and stank the joint up at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, where Thomas Edison was one of just many left amazed and perplexed by his ability to fart the entire French national anthem, blow out candles with the force of his emissions, and smoke cigarettes through his arse. His nickname? ‘Le Pétomane’. The rough translation? ‘Fartomaniac’. Truly, the man was an icon of the farting community.
Fittingly, then, Pujol was paid loving tribute by another ground-breaker of the fart arena, with Mel Brooks’ Governor William J. Le Petomane deriving his name directly from the ‘Fartomaniac’ in 1974’s Blazing Saddles. Such was his admiration of the pioneer who’d farted closer to the sun than any before him; the classic comedy decided the best way to further its glowingly gaseous homage would be to drop some historical air biscuits of its very own.
To wit, the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles features the first audible farts in a motion picture, with a butt-full of beans creating an extended cacophony of noise that carries on for almost an entire minute. Just like that, Adam Sandler knew how he would make his fortune, with farts no longer viewed as taboo, having been wafted out for cinephiles the world over to enjoy.
Is there a secret to the perfect number of farts to deploy in a scene? According to Brooks, there is, and he should know, seeing as he farted his way straight into the annals of filmic firsts. “I had a rough cut, and maybe I had 16 farts,” he once shared. “Things didn’t get exciting until the fourth or fifth one, and the laughter began to diminish around the 12th fart, so I said, “OK, cut it off at 12.” I did it kind of systematically. I do a lot of homework.”
Ever since then, any self-respecting comedy worth its salt has made use of the fart as a means to weaponise laughter, even if some do it much better than others. Blazing Saddles got there first, though, and has thusly been enshrined as the industry’s maiden audible farter as a result.
