Blame It on the Dog (12 page)

The next day, when a listener rang Stern’s program to find out why Will’s farts had been so heavily edited, Stern took the opportunity to explain that Chiusano had been discussing the proper length and dampness of farts off the air for several days, before the topic came up on air. To paraphrase the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Chiusano didn’t know what a too-long or too-wet fart was, but he knew it when he heard it. “He’s our own personal Fart Guard,” Stern said, adding that the whole idea was ridiculous because the FCC had never fined anyone for airing farts before, and even if they tried to levy a fine, the station could take them to court, which would be hilarious because then the bureaucrats and politicians would have to elucidate for the record what a proper fart should sound like.

But the real problem, Stern lamented, was that the FCC would never allow the matter to go to court. In the past, when radio executives tried to stand up against unreasonable FCC rules or decisions, the federal agency had put their various station acquisitions and license renewals into legal limbo. “It’s extortion,” Stern complained, “but somehow our government is allowed to do it legally.” In the meantime, he said, even though Chiusano had recently knocked Will the Farter’s
record-setting thirty-second blast off the air (see
chapter 45
), anyone interested could still hear it on the Howard Stern website.

Two weeks later, on February 17, Chiusano officially told Stern that he could no longer do “extended farting” on the show, whatever that meant. Stern insisted that he wanted to fart, it was his show, and he found farts just as funny now as he did when he was five. “My whole life, all I ever wanted to do was fart in a microphone,” he said. He promised that as soon as he left terrestrial radio for Sirius, he would return to the old fart jokes and bits he used to do.

A month later, on March 14, the topic came up again when Stern wanted to bring Will the Farter back on the show to celebrate his upcoming marriage. Unfortunately, Tom Chiusano wouldn’t allow them to do any comedy bits with Will, because his farts, being spontaneous, couldn’t be monitored for length or wetness ahead of time. When Will announced over the phone that he’d like to bring in a friend who didn’t mind being farted on, he was told that Chiusano wouldn’t let that happen either, because the new station rules barred anyone from farting on or at another person.

Naturally, Stern fans had a field day with all this nonsense, but former TV critic Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine (
http://buzzmachine.com
) probably blogged it best:

There’s poetic justice in there somewhere.

To appreciate the significance of Howard Stern’s being silenced (or at least muffled), you have to know that for the past twenty-five years he’s been on the media’s cutting-cheese edge, farting regularly into his microphone, hosting farting contests, and playing a superhero named Fartman (see the “Adventures of Fartman” chapter in
Who Cut the Cheese?
). “Fartman just flew in from the [West] Coast, and boy is his ass tired,” Stern announced at one point in 1996, when it looked like New Line Cinema would be green-lighting a Fartman movie. But Stern, who bought the full rights to the Fartman character in 1986 from its National Lampoon creators, backed out when New Line insisted on a G-rated script. Since then, Fartman’s thunder has been stolen by a character in the 1999 film
Mystery Men
named Spleen (played by Paul Reubens, better known as Pee Wee Herman), whose power was his ability to discharge farts so lethally putrid that they incapacitated anyone within noseshot. So naturally Stern was in no mood to see the rest of his butt-cracking legacy disappear.

In early October 2005, with less than three months to go before his Infinity contract ended, Stern delivered a parting shot to the FCC by staging an all-day fartathon on his new Sirius Satellite radio band, Channel 100, to underscore just how much the agency had crippled terrestrial radio. The show’s concept had begun a week earlier when a listener called in to report that Channel 100’s scroll screen on his Sirius system read: “We’re building toward Howard’s arrival in January.” Stern started riffing about how executives at Sirius wanted him to put up some kind of programming right away, even if it was just a tone, so that people would know their Sirius radios were working. Another caller suggested that Stern should introduce his channel by playing a tape of nonstop farting. Stern sidekick Artie Lange took the idea a step further by suggesting that Stern get live farters to work around the clock, which prompted Gary Dell’Abate to report that the program’s semi-professional farters, who had been out of commission since the FCC crackdown, were dying to go back to work and get crackin’.

So the pooting stalwarts—Will the Farter, Junior the Farter, Dan the Farter, and Debbie the Queefer (who makes noises with the muscles of her vagina)—were quickly rounded up, and Sirius was
instructed to change the scrolls on Channel 100 to “Farters coming soon.” The result was one full day of live farting, unrestrained by any restrictions beyond pure talent, as the Flatulent Four worked in six-hour shifts. At the end of twenty-four hours, the channel returned to silence, but Stern had made his point.

Though none of the butt fluttering could be simulcasted or rebroadcasted on Stern’s syndicated radio show, it was the main topic for days, as dozens of listeners called in to rave about what “great radio” awaited everyone in the sky, far above the reach of the FCC.

At the end of 2005, when Howard Stern finally abandoned earth-bound radio, he left open the question of what kind of fart, if any, the FCC would tolerate on the nation’s airwaves from here on. With Stern gone, it’s unlikely that anyone will be bold enough to push the envelope … or pull anyone’s finger too strenuously, lest the fart go on for a second too long.

WAR STINKS …
AND IT’S GETTING STINKIER!

A
former Pentagon scientist has been working on weaponizing the fart for modern warfare and domestic crowd control, according to a November 2002 article in the
Los Angeles Times
. Actually, the idea’s not entirely new. During World War II, Division 19, a secret psychological operations department within the Office of Special Services (OSS, America’s pre-CIA spy outfit), developed a fecal-smelling mixture packed in a squirt tube, and called it Who Me? The sulfur-based substance smelled roughly like the odor that’s added to natural gas to make it noticeable, with a dose of spoiled mushrooms mixed in. The OSS shipped tubes of the stinky stuff to occupied China and distributed them to children, who then sneaked up behind Japanese officers on crowded streets and squirted the liquid on the seats of their pants. Because of their exaggerated sense of personal dignity—called “face”—the Japanese were deeply humiliated when people around them thought they had farted or shit in their pants. The compound’s name, incidentally, was based on the fact that the gesture among Japanese for “Who, me?” was pointing a finger at the nose, rather than at the chest as Americans do.

Today, Pamela Dalton, a cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, is working with the Pentagon’s Nonlethal Weapons Program to combine Who Me? with another fetid formula called U.S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor, which bathroom cleanser and deodorizer manufacturers
originally invented to test the effectiveness of their products. (In other words, Bathroom Malodor had to be more repugnant than anything that might appear naturally in or around somebody’s toilet bowl—maybe even bad enough to knock a fly off a turd.) During Bathroom Malodor’s sniff trials, people of various ethnic backgrounds called it the vilest stench that had ever assaulted their olfactories. Even Ms. Dalton had to admit that Bathroom Malodor “smells like shit, but much, much stronger. It fills your head. It gets to you in ways that are unimaginable. It’s not something you are likely to come across in the real world.”

Mixing what she called “the worst of Bathroom Malodor and Who Me?” Dalton came up with Stench Soup, a miasma so execrable and obnoxious that it practically freezes people in their tracks, clouds their minds, and creates fear and loathing by activating the brain’s primitive responses to nasty and dangerous smells that allowed our ancestors to run away and survive. If you’ve been gang-sprayed by a mother skunk and all of her brood, or if you’ve had to take a crap in an overloaded Porta-Potti on a 105°F day, you may have an inkling of what it feels like to get a blast of Stench Soup.

So far, the Pentagon hasn’t figured out how to weaponize Dalton’s synthetic fart into what writer Stephanie Pain of
New Scientist
magazine calls “the mother of all stink bombs.” There is also a problem of whether Stench Soup could be considered a toxic chemical weapon, subject to ethical and legal tests mandated by the international Chemical Weapons Convention.

But if it ever passes muster, a Stench Soup warhead could probably replace the infamous Daisy Cutter, the massive firebomb that U.S. planes used against dug-in Taliban and Al Qaida fighters during the Afghanistan war. We could call it the Cheese Cutter.

MEET THE DUMFARTS

H
ow would you like to spend your whole life telling people, “Yes, I’m a Dumfart”?

Actually, you’d more likely be telling them, “Ja, ich bin ein Dumfart,” because Dumfarts are most plentiful in the heartland of Austria, with a few strays in Germany. Linz, Austria, seems to be their ancestral home; many Dumfarts live there, including the owner of the Dumfart Gas-und Wasserleitung Installationsgesellschaft, which installs plumbing and gas lines. They’re rare in the United States and England, most likely because any immigrant Dumfarts changed their name as soon as they realized why everybody was guffawing.

Anyway, besides concert tuba player Karl Dumfart (savor for a moment the image of a Dumfart tooting the tuba), the most famous Dumfarts are Josef and Maria, who gained posthumous renown when a photo of their grave marker in Austria made the rounds on the Internet.

Among the many websites celebrating the Dumfart couple is Louisville Mojo (
http://louisvillemojo.com
), which asks visitors to supply a caption to the photo. Among the submissions:

“In today’s news, the man who invented the pull-my-finger joke died at the age of 97.”

“Josef and Maria Dumfart are survived by their only child, Ima Dumfart.”

“Their presence will linger on with us for years to come.”

According to Manfred Dumfart, an Austrian engineer who is presently working in Johannesburg, South Africa, Maria was his mother and Josef was either her father or grandfather. “The whole Dumfart family tree is not 100 percent clear to me, but my ‘uncle’ in Austria should know more about it,” he said in a March 2005 email. “I will contact him, because I want to know myself more about our family.”

Since then, Herr Dumfart has apparently caught wind of what I was doing. I’m still waiting to hear back from him.

KIRK TO SPOCK: MIND-MELD
THIS!