Blame It on the Dog (14 page)

I
n
Who Cut the Cheese?
I talked about the “flatulent factors,” complex sugars called oligosaccharides (raffinose, stachyose, and verbacose) that exist in fairly high amounts in most green vegetables, legumes, and beans. Your average herbivore can break down these carbohydrates without even thinking about it, but we humans can’t, so we pass them along through our digestive tract as a movable feast, a veritable smorgasbord, for our millions of bacterial guests, and the next thing you know, a cloud of gas is thundering down our lower intestine searching for a way out and refusing to take no for an answer.

Science has tried to defeat oligosaccharides by breeding a fartless (or less fartful) bean, and by prepackaging exotic bacterial cultures in products like Beano, which can be sprinkled or squirted on food, but both attempts have achieved only modest success. Old wives claim that soaking beans and legumes in water overnight can make them less gaseous, as long as they’re not cooked in the same water. And now, according to a BBC report dated March 27, 2002, scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay, India, claim that beans can be partly neutralized by blasting them with radioactive rays, just like something out of a fifties sci-fi movie.

Irradiation technology is already commonly used all over the world to extend the shelf life of fruits, herbs, and spices by killing the bacteria that make them rot, but this idea of making “the musical
fruit” less musical could have a powerful effect on the world’s diet, not to mention smog and global warming.

The Indian researchers broke mung beans, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, and red kidney beans into three separate groups. They zapped the first group with a low-intensity gamma-ray beam, and the second with a beam three times as strong. The third group wasn’t irradiated at all. Then, adding a touch of “old wives” technology, all the beans were soaked in cold water for two days before being tested.

Jammala Machaiah, who carried out the research with colleague Mrinal Pednekar, wrote in the scientific journal
Food Chemistry
that the radiation treatment itself broke down the sugars only slightly. But when the beans and legumes were then soaked, their oligosaccharide levels dropped according to how much they had been nuked beforehand. For example, soaking low-dose-radiated mung beans reduced their oligosaccharide levels by 70 percent, whereas levels in high-dosed beans were cut by 80 percent. In beans that hadn’t been irradiated, the soaking process dropped their fart-inducing properties only 35 percent. Black-eyed peas and chickpeas also showed a marked improvement with irradiation; but kidney beans, which have low levels of oligosaccharides to begin with, were unaffected.

Machaiah said, “In India, beans are a very popular and important part of the national diet, but some people can’t eat a lot of beans because of the flatulence problem. This is unfortunate, as it is a very good source of essential nutrients. Irradiation would make beans less of a problem.”

And not just for humans. Stephen Cole, technical director of Enzyme Services & Consultancy in Blackwood, Wales, is looking at new ways to break down oligosaccharides in animal feed to prevent pigs and chickens from becoming bloated and stinking up their sties and coops. He believes that oligosaccharides are “anti-nutritional factors. If irradiation helps reduce them, that’s good.”

Considering that our crowded world is getting even more crowded every day, anything we can do to reduce methane gas is a blessing to mankind. Also, vegetable diets are easier on the environment than meat-based diets, so anything that makes beans and veggies less gassy has to be good, right?

Well, Catherine Collins, spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, disagrees. She told
BBC News Online
that oligosaccharides are good for us because the bacteria that attack them maintain our natural defenses against other unpleasant intrusions. “The immune system is [kept] in a state of readiness,” she said. “When it meets something [worse] like salmonella, it very quickly leaps into action and gets rid of it.” She said that oligosaccharides also help control cholesterol levels.

Glenn Gibson, a food microbiologist at England’s Reading University, is also against nuking the fart factors, but for another reason: “Flatulence is an important indicator of a healthy gut system. It’s only a social problem. You need to expel gas to ensure your gut is functioning properly.” In other words, whenever you blast off a good one, think of it as a toast to your good health.

I can think of a bigger problem. If we start eating irradiated beans on a regular basis, what happens if our farts go nuclear? They’re explosive enough as it is.

ROSES ARE RED
,
FARTS ARE BLUE, BUT ONLY IF YOU LIGHT THEM, TOO!

W
hen
Who Cut the Cheese?
came out in 1999, only a couple of newspapers reviewed or even mentioned it, and none of them ventured near that four-letter F word that dare not speak its name behind your back in mixed company. But that all changed on June 18, 2004, when Mark Caro wrote a piece for the
Chicago Tribune
about how many of the new Father’s Day cards were basically fart jokes:

“A couple are sitting up in bed, smiling at each other, beneath the printed words: ‘On Father’s Day, Dear, I just want you to know I love you.’ Ah, a nice Father’s Day card. Let’s open it up:

“ ‘… even if you do fart in bed.’

“Egads! Sorry, that had no business appearing in a family newspaper,” Caro wrote. “Let’s find another one.”

Next up was a card with an innocent looking dog with a “Pffft!” coming from off to the side, where a cherished member of the family was about to put the blame on him.

[Authorial aside: Enough of this blaming-the-dog nonsense. Dammit, take responsibility for your own farts! Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled chapter.]

Still in Caro’s pile of family cards were a “half dozen other ones that equate Dad with noxious fumes,” he said, in preparation for his central question: “Okay, folks, who put the second ‘r’ into Father’s Day?”

Cue the greeting card lady. “I think it’s a safe way to be shocking,” said Rachel Bolton, a spokeswoman for Hallmark, which maintains its Shoebox line of greeting cards that deviate from the venerable company’s hoary homilies and feel-good felicitations. “It wouldn’t appear on cards if it hadn’t been part of virtually everyone’s experience at one point in life.”

At this juncture in the article [
self-promotion alert! self-promotion alert!
], Mark Caro phoned me for a comment, and since it’s mine I’ll use it here without fear of being called a plagiarist: “It seems like although farting has always been taboo, within families it’s always a private joke,” I told him. “ ‘Pull my finger,’ ‘Is that a barking spider?’—this comes from parents dealing with their kids. Families hold these kind of things dear, whether they realize it or not. I think every family has one person that everybody else considers to be the farter.”

Caro reasoned that that person had to be Dad, “unless I just missed the ‘Pffft!’ section of Mother’s Day cards.”

Indeed, American Greetings Corporation, which calls itself one of the world’s largest makers of greeting cards, does sell more humorous cards around Father’s Day than during any other time of the year, according to a spokeswoman. But it’s hardly the only season or occasion for sending fart jokes to friends and loved ones. The only greeting card subsections at your local Wal-Mart or Hallmark shop not likely to have them are Weddings and Funerals.

Hey, wait a minute, I just thought of an idea for a sympathy card. A middle-aged gentleman is lying in his coffin during the viewing. His right forearm has been propped up, with the forefinger extended. The widow is speaking as she and another woman gaze down at him. When you open the card, it says, “He looks so natural.”

Okay, here’s another one that just popped into my head. A bride and groom are standing in front of a preacher. The groom’s ready to put the ring on her finger, but with a smirk on her face she’s holding out the wrong finger. Now open the card: “Yes, I do.”

If any greeting card company out there plans on using either one, please send me a check. Or better yet, hire me. I need the work.

Anyway, the greeting card is a great year-round seller because it’s the perfect format for a joke. On the front you get the setup. Then you open the card for the punch line. One, two, ba-
dum
!

For example, one recent card features a cartoon of a man saying, “I wanted to give you something really personal for your birthday.” Inside: “…  So I farted in this card.”

Another card has a cartoon of a grinning cat saying, “I really hope you like this Valentine …” Inside: “Somebody farted in the card shop and I could only hold my breath long enough to grab this one!”

A cartoon of a reindeer with frost coming out of his mouth says, “If you can see your breath when it’s cold outside …” Inside, the card says, “… How come you can’t see your farts? Oh, well, Merry Christmas.”

Above a cartoon of a dog with a shredded piece of paper in his mouth are the words “I originally bought you one of those neat, musical Easter cards that plays a song whenever you open it, but the dog ate it.” Inside: “Now whenever he farts, he plays ‘Easter Parade.’ ”

Some cards go far beyond the simple one-two. A cartoon skunk on the cover announces, “A poem for your birthday, ‘All About Farts.’ ” Inside are ten pages of doggerel that end with, “We mustn’t forget dear, sweet old farts like you!”

The apparent success of these cards demonstrates how casual we Americans have become over the past thirty years, not only about body humor but in our relationships with each other. But how much longer can this go on? Is the greeting card with a flatulent jibe destined to be an evergreen visitor whenever holidays and birthdays come around? Or will the jokes eventually run out of gas?

LE PETOMANE—FLATAL ATTRACTION

I
s the world ready for Le Petomania?

Even though he’s no longer here to blow his own trumpet, Joseph Pujol, better known as Le Petomane, may be ready for his comeback. Who said his career was behind him? His career was
always
behind him.

It’s been over 110 years now since Pujol breezed into Belle Epoque Paris and tickled funny bones on the Moulin Rouge’s outdoor Elephant stage, imitating birds, human voices, musical instruments, and booming artillery with his talented tuchus. There was no other entertainer like him. As actor Kelsey Grammer remarked to TV host Jay Leno in 1995, “This man took the history books by the pages and really ripped one out for himself.”

Though Pujol’s appellation has been translated sometimes as “farting man,” it actually means “fart mania”—a phenomenon that could happen again. In addition to my own lengthy chapter on him in
Who Cut the Cheese?
there are plenty of copies around of
Le Petomane (1857–1945)
, the definitive biography by Jean Nohain and F. Caradec (translated into English by British playwright Warren Tute—yes, Tute), both Sherbourne Press’s 1968 English language originals and 1986 Random House reprints. Le Petomane also showed up recently as a literary character, snuffing out candles and farting “Clair de Lune” in Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s 2004 novel
Madeleine Is Sleeping
—a fiction nominee for the prestigious National Book Award,
the literary world’s Oscar. In a conversation with moderator David Medaris at a Madison, Wisconsin, book festival in September 2004, Bynum said, “In the course of haphazard reading or movie watching or music listening, I’d occasionally come across brief references to lives that would trouble or tickle me: the village idiot, the flatulent man, the woman singing the part of the leading man. I wouldn’t do any further research; the one exception was Le Petomane, the farting artist, whose biography I read—a little novelty book found in the office of my father, who’s a gastroenterologist.”

But Le Petomane has found his greatest voice—orally and otherwise—in cinema, where a couple of actors have brought him to life. He made his first entrance in 1979, when Ian MacNaughton, the Scottish director who helmed most of the Monty Python Flying Circus movies, made a thirty-five-minute comedy called
Le Petomane
for British TV’s innovative Channel 4. Casting the film, MacNaughton gave first crack at Le Petomane to Ron Moody, a London actor whom American audiences may recognize as the lead in Mel Brooks’s early film
The Twelve Chairs
(1970). But Moody felt the part lacked a certain, oh, dignity and gravitas. So the director turned to Leonard Rossiter, the then-current star of one of Britain’s favorite TV comedies,
The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin
, as well as a busy character actor who had appeared in a couple of Stanley Kubrick films, including
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Though the real Le Petomane was in his mid-thirties during his heyday at the Moulin Rouge, Rossiter was twenty years older and in some scenes had to be photographed carefully.
Le Petomane
followed the Nohain-Caradec biography, but comedy writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (who created British TV’s
Steptoe and Son
, which became
Sanford and Son
in the United States) added a few gags of the sort that a good farter would play on the people around him, such as fooling a fellow soldier into thinking his boots were creaking as he walked. The film also suggested, despite a lack of any evidence, that Pujol made a recording of Debussey’s “Clair de Lune”—perhaps that’s where Sarah Shun-lien Bynum got the idea for Pujol’s musical performance in
Madeleine Is Sleeping
—and that he ended his career after he began soiling himself onstage, the result of aging bowels. The farts in the film were created electronically by Electrophon Music, Ltd.