Blame It on the Dog (17 page)

According to an Internet Movie Database (
http://imdb.com
) item dated May 28, 2002, British actress Helena Bonham Carter, known for her upscale Merchant Ivory roles, farted during her sex scene with Paul Bettany on the set of
Heart of Me
. Bettany, best known as the albino monk assassin in
The Da Vinci Code
, jokingly admitted later that he was horrified—not by Helena’s stinky wind, but by her claiming such proud ownership of it in front of everyone on the set. He said, “She farted on me, announced the fact to the cast and crew, and of course
I
was the one who ended up feeling embarrassed.” But the episode didn’t put Bettany off working with the actress in the future: “She’s barking mad, keen as mustard, and funny as fuck!” he said in the way of a compliment.

TV Guide
(August 21, 2005) reported that actress Holland Taylor, who plays Charlie Sheen’s mother on CBS’s
Two and a Half Men
, was asked during a July 20 press conference why there was so much flatulence humor on the show. “We have to have fart jokes because everyone in the cast farts constantly,” said the regal actress, no stranger to on-the-set eructations, having costarred eight years earlier in Disney’s 1997 fart-fest
George of the Jungle
. Costar Jon Cryer, who
plays Taylor’s other son, blamed it on the food. “It’s a catering issue, really,” he joked. They also pointed out that Angus T. Jones, Cryer’s young son on the show, contracted a severe case of the giggles when he had to say, “You almost made me poop my pants.” “That had him going for hours,” Cryer said. “He almost pooped his pants.”

Actor/comic Jack Black says he uses farting as a way of shedding his inhibitions before shooting a scene. On the road promoting
The School of Rock
in 2005, Black told Thomas Chau of Cinema Confidential (
http://cinecon.com
), “I don’t want to say this ’cause it sounds dumb, but one time I cut a really big fart. It was really rude of me, but I thought about this thing—one time I was in this movie with Jim Carrey … I had a really small part in
The Cable Guy
. I remember he slam-dunked the ball in that one scene where he’s playing basketball and the whole backboard shatters.… When we shot that scene, he was laying on the ground and they yelled, ‘Action!’ And then, BRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAP! The loudest fart you’ve ever heard. They just continued with the scene as if nothing happened. Everyone just broke down laughing so hard and I remember not laughing, just going, ‘There’s a lesson to be learned. [Carrey] just does not give a shit what you think. That’s why he’s so fucking funny.’ It sounds stupid that I learned a lesson from his giant fart. So [mine] was a bit of an homage to the master.” So far, we haven’t heard whether Black’s later costar, King Kong, also farted to break the ice, but since there were no reports of a massive explosion or deaths by asphyxiation on the film’s New Zealand set, Kong probably kept his gas to himself.

Some actors are reticent about admitting to passing wind themselves, but more than willing to talk about others. On April 30, 2003, when Rebecca Romijn-Stamos was a guest on the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
to discuss her role as the blue-tinted, shape-shifting Mystique in
X
2, she recounted in chatty, even pointless detail the problems of sharing a costume with the girl who did her stunts.

Latina actress/comedienne/lesbian Marga Gomez, in her one-woman show called
Los Big Names
, joked about her time as a cast member of the 1999 sci-fi film
Sphere
, dealing with, among other things, Dustin Hoffman’s chronic flatulence. Apparently Hoffman, besides being gassy, considers farting a source of good humor. Meryl Streep once said that on the set of
Kramer vs. Kramer
(1979), Hoffman kept Justin Henry, the kid who played their son, focused by being, as she put it, “a walking whoopee cushion” of flatulence jokes.

And now we end this chapter on a somber, yet uplifting note. When Australia’s renowned comedian Gordon Chater died at the age of seventy-seven in 1999, actor Warren Mitchell, who costarred with Chater in a 1981 production of
The Dresser
, recalled: “He could be so funny, and he was a naughty farter on stage—there he’d be, lying on his couch as the ham actor with this great belly—it wasn’t padding—
and there’d suddenly be this loud noise. We were unable to speak for minutes.” Athletic actor Rex Mossop remembered appearing in a scene with Chater in an episode of the popular 1960s TV show
My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours?
“The scene was to show Chater being near-strangled in my headlock, on closeup,” said Mossop. “I was to use a lot of facial expression indicating how hard I was trying.
Action!
Chater struggles valiantly for about fifteen seconds, suddenly goes limp, and then emits one of the famous Chater farts, which brings the cast and crew completely undone!”

Let him R.I.P.

LAW & ODOR: CREPITATING INTENT

W
hat’s with those gassy gendarmes, farting felons, and scatological scofflaws?

On June 6, 2001, Reuters reported that London police were seeking a flatulent flatfoot after a family complained that he farted in their home during a drug raid and failed to apologize. “We can confirm that the department is investigating an incivility charge during the search of a home under the Misuse of Drugs act,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

The department’s letter of reprimand to the butt-blurting bobby was printed in London’s
Daily Mail
newspaper: “An allegation has been received from a person in the house that one of the male officers broke wind and did not apologize to the family for his action … the complainant felt it was rude and unprofessional.” Police did not confirm what discipline the officer might receive if found guilty of breaking wind. Perhaps a black mark in his jacket (to match the brown mark in his underwear).

Two years later, a policeman in Fullerton, California, was reprimanded for farting in a victim’s face. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, here’s how the crime went down. Four officers responded to a possible suicide in a trailer park. When they entered the trailer, they found a woman lying on her bed, seemingly unconscious. They knew her from previous calls as someone who drank too much, made too much noise, and often passed out. After the officers tried to wake
her by shouting her name and shaking both her and the bed, one of them lowered himself inches from her face and, according to the reporter, “passed gas loudly,” saying, “This ought to wake her up.” He didn’t realize that she was only feigning unconsciousness; hence the charge of, well, maybe it was
assault
with a deadly (but not so silent) weapon.

Occasionally a perp strikes back. According to the BBC News (September 7, 2001), after David Paul Grixti, a twenty-eight-year-old Australian, was fined $200 in the Werribee Magistrate Court for “letting the flatulence escape” in a public place, he appealed to County Court Judge Leslie Ross and won.

The case against Grixti was based on an incident at Werribee police station thirteen months earlier. Local officers said that he approached the counter at the station watch house and, after being asked if he needed help, “poked the rear end of his body out” and farted. Senior Constable Shane Andrew Binns testified that Grixti was staring right at him as he did it, and that his farts created a stench in the station. A second witness also told the court that the farting had been deliberate. But Judge Ross ruled that breaking wind was “quite often involuntary” and that Grixti’s bending over to make the situation “a little more comfortable” was not proof of intent to pass gas. “I don’t believe … you can turn that particular piece of human behavior on at will,” the judge said.

Case dismissed.

But there are times when the miscreant does go to prison. In 1994, the
New York Daily News
reported that early on the morning of October 30, a fart pointed the finger at a “career criminal.” Richard Magpiong, fifty-six, was burglarizing an upscale Fire Island home when several residents came downstairs to check out the noise they’d heard. Magpiong hid in a closet while they looked around, and he might have gone undetected if he hadn’t suddenly let one go. They yanked the door open and held him (along with their noses) until the police arrived. He had forgotten the burglar’s creed: when you’re on a job, windows and wind should never be broken loudly.

A lawsuit by an inmate who blamed prison food for his flatulence problem was among “the looniest lawsuits of 1999,” according to a legal watchdog group, Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch. The
case lingered for so long in the public imagination that it became Exhibit A—Case No. 9650302—when the state’s assistant attorney general testified before the Michigan Senate Judiciary Committee six years later, in January 2005, that frivolous prisoner lawsuits were overburdening state and federal courts.

Nineteen ninety-nine must have been a big year for flatulence-related lawsuits (“We’re gonna fart like it’s 1999”). Overlawyered (
http://overlawyered.com
) reports that in August of that year, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination dismissed a Plymouth city employee’s complaint that her boss had inflicted a hostile working environment on her with his constant butt crackings. She was fuming—almost as much as he was.

Going back to Michigan, the January 23, 2005, edition of
The Detroit News
reported that Washtenaw Circuit Court Judge Timothy Connors had finally gotten around to setting a court date for a case filed two years earlier, when DaimlerChrysler employees Bekele Gedion and Jose Alva sued the company for failing to control racial harassment and other offensive workplace behavior, including a May 2002 incident in which employees made farting sounds at them over the public address system.

Not even our nation’s courtrooms are safe. Clark Head, who was a Calaveras County, California, criminal defense attorney in the 1980s, appealed the conviction of his client on burglary charges because the prosecuting attorney “broke wind about one hundred times” and severely distracted the jury during Head’s final argument. He said the prosecutor “even lifted his leg several times.” But the appeals court affirmed his client’s guilt and called the prosecutor’s conduct “harmless error.”

On all counts, we the jury find the defendants gassy as charged!

STINKING, YES! SINKING, NO!

H
ave you ever had one of those turds that just couldn’t be flushed down the toilet? It’s called a floater. And your tax dollars were spent trying to figure out what keeps it from going under.