Blame It on the Dog (15 page)

Four years later, in 1983, Ugo Tognazzi, age sixty-one, took over the part of Joseph Pujol in
Il Petomane
(released internationally as
Petomaniac
), a feature-length Italian production directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. I must confess that I haven’t seen this film, but I’m sure its basic message is that all things must pass. Unfortunately, that includes Rossiter and Tognazzi.

More recently, in 2001, Australian actor Keith Robinson was listed as portraying the al fresco fart man in Baz Luhrmann’s overstuffed
Moulin Rouge
, but he was either left on the cheese-cutting-room floor or else he got lost in the film’s loud and opulent emptiness.

Mel Brooks paid homage to Pujol in his 1974 breakthrough film
Blazing Saddles
—whose notorious cowboy campfire scene set the standard for Hollywood’s flatulence excellence—by playing a character named Governor William J. LePetomane.

And then there’s the mockumentary. An Albany, New York-based media artist named Igor Vamos and writer Bret Fetzer produced a fifty-six-minute film in 1998 called
Le Petomane: Fin de Siècle Fartiste
(End-of-the-Century Fartist), described by one critic as “a humorous deconstruction in the style of a PBS documentary.” They resurrected and re-created Pujol using old photos and documents, newspaper clippings, archival footage (including clips of a Thomas Edison Company film of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and selections from the early films of the Lumière brothers and George Méliès), and a couple of scratchy, black-and-white reconstructions showing Le Petomane performing onstage (subverted by the actor’s modern body language) and farting into a recording horn. There are also some deadpan talking heads: a doctor explaining how Pujol did his act; a great-grandson revealing family lore; and experts talking about Le Petomane’s influence upon early filmmakers like Méliès, impressionist composer Erik Satie, various art movements of the early twentieth century, and the rise of modern industrialism. Unfortunately, Vamos is ham-handed in his juxtaposition of real and fake, and tone deaf when creating modern day interviewees. The only viewers likely to be fooled are those who are totally unfamiliar with Le Petomane and his
fin-de-siècle
milieu.

Currently, an independent filmmaker in Hollywood named Randolph Mack, who co-scripted
Burning Annie
(2003), says he has
a Le Petomane project “in development.” Mack admits he got the idea for the movie while reading my Pujol chapter in
Who Cut the Cheese?
“When I saw the item where Johnny Depp said that he’d love to play Le Petomane, I decided to write a screenplay.” Depp is “interested” in the project, Mack claims, but the actor is withholding any commitment until he sees a final rewrite of the script.

The ideal director, of course, would be Depp’s frequent collaborator, Tim Burton. Together, the two have already created a character named Edward who could cut the cheese or rip a good one with his scissor-like hands, and revived a 1950s figure, also named Ed, responsible for some of Hollywood’s biggest stinkers. With a team like Depp and Burton, we could be fairly certain that their
Le Petomane
biopic wouldn’t be just another blast from the past.

CURING FARTS THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

O
ver the past four hundred years, pharmacologists, herbalists, and old wives have been prescribing green moss, ginger root, cloves, peppermint, rosemary, star anise (a licorice-flavored fruit), champagne, charcoal, and who knows what else to alleviate intestinal gas and cure flatulence. More recently, medical researchers suggest that the drug known generically as simethicone—marketed as Gas-X, Flatulex, Mylanta Gas Relief, and No-Fart (okay, I made up the No-Fart)—reduces intestinal bloating by decreasing the surface tension of gas bubbles.

But cocktail waitresses and bartenders claim they have the perfect low-cost antifart medicine. It’s Angostura aromatic bitters, an herbal flavoring and stimulant that’s been touted for more than a century as a digestive aid. Pharmacists, who prefer that you buy something pricier, won’t mention Angostura bitters, but you can always find a four-ounce bottle for a few dollars at any neighborhood supermarket, usually near the margarita mix; and bartenders keep it on hand next to the grenadine and vermouth because it’s an ingredient in several cocktails, including old-fashioneds (bourbon, a sugar cube, and bitters) and manhattans (whiskey, vermouth, and bitters). Cooks use it, too, for dosing sauces, salad dressings, soups, and just about anything else that needs a fillip.

The Angostura label suggests that one-to-four teaspoons after a meal will relieve gas. Nightclub workers say a mere teaspoon in a glass
of a clear, carbonated liquid like club soda, 7-Up, or sparkling water will do the trick. Drink up and fart no more, at least for a while.

In 1824, in the Venezuelan port town of Angostura (renamed Ciudad Bolivar two decades later), Dr. J. G. B. Siegert developed Angostura bitters as a tonic to treat fatigue and stomach ailments. Siegert’s blend—still a secret—reportedly contains over forty tropical herbs, plant extracts, and spices, including gentian root, which some researchers think is the prime ingredient for neutralizing farts. (Gentian plants are commonly used around the world as a remedy for various ailments, including high blood pressure, leprosy, snakebite, and venereal disease.) There are also “flavoring extracts and vegetable coloring material,” not to mention a considerable amount of alcohol—40 percent by volume—which suggests that Angostura bitters has changed since its formula and trademark were taken over by Angostura International of Auburn, Maine, and held subject to U.S. FDA approval. (The bitters are still manufactured in Trinidad, West Indies, “By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” according to the bottle’s label.) There are other aromatic bitters, but only this one is called Angostura. Though it is, as doctor and nutritionist Andrew Weil described it, “essentially a tincture of gentian root”—much like an elixir in a suspiciously dark bottle once sold off the back of a medicine wagon—Angostura bitters is now the single most widely distributed bar item in the world.

In other words, it bars gas from roaring out of your ass like some raucous, drunken lout.

THANK YOU FOR NOT FARTING

A
lmost thirty years ago, comic Steve Martin told a joke on his
Let’s Get Small
album about a guy who sits down next to him in a bar and asks, “Mind if I smoke?”

“No,” Martin responds. “Do you mind if I fart? It’s one of my habits.”

“By equating farting with smoking tobacco on a popular comedy record (
Let’s Get Small
was a top-ten hit on
Billboard’s
album chart in late 1977), Martin fired the first shot of the nascent anticigarette campaign that would eventually transform the United States from a hazy nation of “fag fiends” to a clear-sky country of nonsmokers.

And now that same message has come to mainstream television in the form of public service ads, like the following one.

The commercial shows a black family—parents and their three teenagers—in an SUV. Suddenly the kids start waving their hands, making gagging noises, and saying, “Roll down the window, oh my goodness!”

“That’s foul, man!”

“Ah, you smell
that?
”

We’ve been led to believe that somebody blasted an insufferable sulfuric stinker—until Dad, behind the wheel, rolls down the window and tosses out his cigarette. A voice-over intones, “Don’t pass gas, let it out.”

A second ad shows a young family at home. The kids are complaining, “Man, is that you?” and “Grandpa, you’re killing me over here!” The baby starts crying.

Again, a disembodied voice says, “Don’t pass gas—take it outside. A smoke-free home is a lifesaver. And a money-saver.”

Behind these public service announcements are the Ad Council, a prolific nonprofit producer of such ads, and the American Legacy Foundation, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit agency created after the tobacco industry and forty-five state attorneys general signed the November 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which stipulated that part of the $206 billion settlement the industry owed the states had to be used for campaigns and programs to fight cigarette smoking. The foundation’s message is that even if children can be persuaded not to smoke, they will still have a 25- to 40-percent greater risk of chronic respiratory problems, including asthma, if they’re breathing their parents’ secondhand smoke, “a toxic fog of gases including ammonia, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen cyanide.” Hence the group’s catchphrase, “Don’t pass gas.” (See http://dontpassgas.com for more information and the aforementioned commercials.)

The idea that smoking and stinking are noxious bedfellows has been around a while.
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew
, published in 1700, described “funk” as “Tobacco Smoak; also a strong Smell or Stink,” and
A New Canting Dictionary
(1725) demonstrated the word thus: “What a Funk here is! What a thick Smoak of Tobacco is here! Here’s a damn’d Funk, here’s a great Stink!” The
Oxford English Dictionary
says that by the turn of the eighteenth century,
funk
was also being used as a verb meaning “to blow smoke upon” or “to cause an offensive smell.”

In Scene 1, Act III, of his 1697 play,
The Provoked Wife
, dramatist John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) included the following exchange:

Now
there’s
a message the American Legacy Foundation should run with: if you keep smoking (or farting), your wife will start banging some guy who doesn’t!

THE DERRIERE DIVA:
FLATULENCE MEETS ELEGANCE

S
he’s classy! She’s sassy! She’s gassy! She’s flatomusicologist Flatulina Fontanelle Boutier, just the kind of plucky girl who turns lemons into lemonade, troubles into bubbles, and butt pops into pop music. Her attitude is a breath of air, though not necessarily fresh.

Flatulina claims to be the flatulent love child of circus clown Bubbles Boutier and rock god Nigel Tufnel from the fictional heavy metal group Spinal Tap. Following her mother’s death in a balloon animal accident, young Flatulina accompanied her dad on his band’s “Break Like the Wind” tour as a way of coping with her loss. But because of her chronic anxiety, she began to suffer from an extreme form of gastritis called hypergastrosplosia. That’s when she donned her rose-colored glasses and white wig, and developed her sleight-of-butt magic act, she says.