Blame It on the Dog (3 page)

THE MAN WITH THE SINGING SPHINCTER!

T
he chapter in
Who Cut the Cheese?
that got the most reaction from readers was the story of Joseph Pujol, better known as Le Petomane, whose amazing rectum could sing and mimic an assortment of sounds, including, he claimed, the voice of his mother-in-law. In the early 1890s, his farting displays at the Moulin Rouge in Paris brought in more customers than even the soliloquies of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. But Le Petomane’s act was apparently never filmed or recorded, an oversight that left a void in Western culture and entertainment.

Until now.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Le Petomane’s rightful descendant, Mr. Methane, England’s Prince of Poots, who has dedicated his life to following in the footsteps of the great man—though not too closely.

One day in 1982, a fifteen-year-old boy in Macclesfield, Cheshire, named Paul Oldfield, was practicing yoga when he accidentally discovered that if he rolled onto his back from the lotus position, he could suck air into his anus and, better yet, blow it back out again. Le Petomane had likewise stumbled onto his gift a century earlier, while wading in the ocean and suddenly feeling his lower colon filling up with cold water. Looking back now, Oldfield says, it didn’t cross his mind at the time that farting could bring him fame and fortune, or at least a little bit of each, so he confined his talents to amusing his buddies. “Apart from a few performances in the school squash
court, I did not make use of it,” he says in his normal, punctilious way. He followed a more practical path and became a locomotive engineer for British Railways. Still, whenever he showed off at a party or a backyard barbecue, he always got a big laugh. One day a fellow railroad worker shot some video footage and showed it around. Next thing you know, a local rock and roll band called the Macc Lads invited him to open for them at a joint called the Screaming Beavers Club. Just as the great Le Petomane had performed in an elegant outfit—tails, dark pants (with a trap door in back), and stockings—as a counterpoint to the vulgarity of his act, Oldfield spruced up his thin, six-foot-seven frame in a pinstripe suit for his stage debut. His rectal renditions of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and the theme song from a British sports show brought down the house. He rushed out and made up some business cards. He began showing up at parties all around Macclesfield, farting “Happy Birthday.”

He developed his Mr. Methane character—a caped hero in a green mask and a matching outfit with an M on the chest—when the Macc Lads took him out on the road. “The Mr. Methane idea came about as a result of needing a name and persona to go on tour,” Oldfield says. “Until then I had been billed as ‘The Incredible Farting Man from Buxton Shunting Yards’ and traded as ‘The Bum Notes Fart-a-Gram.’ Somehow from all the brainstorming, the idea for Mr. Methane emerged and I had a costume made.” He claims he wasn’t influenced by Rodger Bumpass’s Fartman character from the 1980
National Lampoon
record album, or by Howard Stern’s subsequent purchase of the rights to the character in 1986. “I had never heard of Fartman then.” (For a detailed history of Fartman, see the Howard Stern chapter in
Who Cut the Cheese?
)

By 1993, Paul Oldfield had quit the railway and his alter ego, Mr. Methane, had begun touring the pubs of England, billing himself as “The World’s Only Performing Flatulist.” He even trumpeted “God Save the Queen” on Swedish television. Figuring that maybe his act could use a little extra class, he borrowed some symphonic CDs from the library and practiced farting along with the classics. And yet he felt underappreciated. “I can perform in three tones,” he told a newspaper at the time, “but so long as a club audience can have a good laugh and see my bottom, they don’t notice which
tone I am playing. I need an audience that will let me grow.” It’s a common complaint among artists great and small—their public doesn’t recognize that there’s a genius behind the artifice, or in this case the fartifice.

Despite his popularity, Mr. Methane couldn’t get an insurance company to cover his ass. “If they could insure Liberace’s hands, Betty Grable’s legs, and Samantha Fox’s breasts, why not my derriere?” Mr. Methane asked. The answer, of course, was that underwriters wouldn’t have been able to prove or disprove whether his occupation had been affected by a disability, so there was too great an opportunity for fraud. “It would be as hard to assess a loss of this man’s talent as it would a loss of taste for a wine taster,” said a representative of the Association of British Insurers.

When Oldfield released his first CD,
mrmethane.com
, he included a mixture of self-penned and traditional melodies, punctuated by soliloquies from Shakespeare—though one line he forgot to throw in was Mistress Quickley’s quip to Falstaff from
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
“She’s as fartuous a civil modest wife, and one, I tell you, that will not miss you morning nor evening prayer, as any is in Windsor.” The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, a charity enacted by Parliament in 1891 to preserve the bard’s home and promote his works, wasn’t impressed. “I have yet to be persuaded that Mr. Methane’s novel approach to reciting well-known passages from Shakespeare will illuminate their meaning or beauty,” wrote the society’s director, Roger Pringle. He suggested that if Mr. Methane insisted on essaying one of Shakespeare’s characters, it should be Nick Bottom, the weaver from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. (He might also have recommended Francis Flute from the same play.)

In 1999 our hero released a video of his stage performance under the title
Mr. Methane Lets Rip!
With the camera at ringside, Mr. Methane farted along, in tempo and relatively in tune, with classical music (including “The Blue Danube Waltz,” but omitting “The Buttcracker Suite”), imitated a pesky bumblebee, created a talcum powder mushroom, breezily snuffed out candles, puffed on a cigarette (adding new meaning to the phrase “Can I bum a smoke?”), and imitated several characters from Robin Hood, all with his talented toot tunnel. For a finale, he stuck a peashooter up his butt and fired
a dart at a medicine-ball-sized balloon halfway across the stage. All this horseplay was broken up by a music video for his theme song, “We Love You, Mr. Methane,” and footage of him in normal street clothes shocking unsuspecting tourists at the English seaside resort of Blackpool with rip-roaring flatulence (captured surreptitiously in “Sphincter Scope”). Naturally, bad taste and worse puns prevailed throughout. Visit
http://fartvideo.com
or
http://mrmethane.com
for a better look.

Mr. Methane made his American debut on Howard Stern’s national radio show on February 1, 2000—literally the dawn of a new century of entertainment. Stern had already been spotlighting amateur farters in tournaments to see how many they could blast in a row or within a certain period of time. (Check out
chapter 45
for a more detailed history of Stern’s crepitation contests.) But Mr. Methane took the art of farting to a new level by tootling the melodies of “Greensleeves” and “Flight of the Bumblebee,” along with Deep Purple’s 1973 rock classic “Smoke on the Water.” But contrary to at least one report, he did not perform the Cranberries’ “[Do You Have to Let It] Linger.”

When Stern invited him back for an encore a few months later, Mr. Methane revealed the downside of being a celebrity farter. He had wanted to perform Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”—retitled “Curry in the Air Tonight”—on Stern’s show, but Collins’s manager, Tony Smith, had stifled his London air by refusing to give him performance clearance. Smith reportedly told Mr. Methane, “It’s a serious song.” The rejection was a great disappointment for the caped crepitator, but stoically he kept it locked up inside. (Author’s note: since Collins has been making elevator music for years, Mr. Methane is the perfect elevator-clearing artist for his material.)

On February 16, 2001, during a phone interview, Stern told Mr. Methane that he would be talking to his agent about bringing him back to America and producing his one-man show on Broadway. Stern believed that people from around the world would clamor to watch this rectal raconteur fart his repertoire of songs and imitations, and he wanted to be part of the phenomenon. But Stern would have to personally sponsor Mr. Methane with the U.S. Immigration Service and attest that the lively-sphinctered limey was a unique talent who
wasn’t coming to America to steal someone else’s act. During the call, Mr. Methane took the opportunity to perform a quick, illicit version of “In the Air Tonight.” (If you feel that listening to an MP3 recording of that performance is a violation of British copyright law, do
not
go to
http://farts.com/intheair.htm.
)

At the end of 2001, Mr. Methane flew into New York for another highly rated appearance on Stern’s radio show. “I am so behind this guy, so to speak,” Stern quipped. Mr. Methane plugged his new Christmas CD of “unplugged” music,
Merry Methane: A Feast of Festive Flatulence
, on which he sang and farted along with eleven holiday songs, backed by former members of the rock groups Jethro Tull and Steeleye Span. He also participated in a new quiz show segment called “Name That Fume,” as Stern and his sidekicks Robin Quivers, Fred Norris, and Artie Lange tried to guess the songs he was farting. He got his cheeks around some yuletide treasures like “Jingle Bells” and “Silent (But Deadly) Night,” which brought tears to everyone’s eyes. As Mr. Methane headed out to entertain people on the street, Stern declared, “I am gonna bring him to Broadway.… This guy deserves to be seen. He’s the greatest superstar that ever lived!” Mr. Methane’s segment aired nationally on cable TV’s E! channel on January 9, 2002.

Returning triumphantly to Europe, Mr. Methane opened an art exhibit in Switzerland entitled
Smells of the Alps
, in which he performed traditional Swiss songs, first karaoke-style and then with the horn section from the Bern Philharmonic. (No, his ass didn’t yodel.) He also appeared on a BBC TV special, blew out the candles on a birthday cake in front of 6,000 people at a gala in Paris, burst a balloon on a woman’s head with an ass dart on French TV, toured Australia several times (where he has become a sensation), and finished a TV pilot for a Mr. Methane animation series. More recently, he has been conferring with one of his fans, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, about doing a parody duet on “Nothing Compares to Poo,” a takeoff on her hit song “Nothing Compares 2 U” (with hopes that the song’s composer—the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince—isn’t too tight-assed about it).

Since his Macc Lads days, Mr. Methane has also opened for dozens of musical artists, including Kiss of the Gypsy, reggae legend
Desmond Dekker, and the Super Furry Animals. But he says the people who appreciate his act the most are the sound engineers. “Once here in the U.K., a sound tech was killing himself laughing at a show, not because of the farting but because he had a gig working with [singer] Kylie Minogue coming up,” he said, “and he was going to give her the same microphone. I think that this sort of sound tech japery, giving the mic to someone of note at a later date, happens quite a bit.”

Despite his other successes, Mr. Methane’s Broadway show has not come to pass. “I haven’t been to the U.S.A. for some time now; the mood has changed considerably post-September 11,” he said in late 2005. “But probably more significant is the Janet Jackson incident. Even Howard seems to have been reined in. Once again farting seems to be taboo on the airwaves, which in a sense is a good thing, as that’s what gives it the impact and longevity and creates the folklore in many ways.”

So please don’t worry about Mr. Methane. He’s never at loose ends for long.

CREPITUS EX MACHINA

B
ack in 1930, Soren Sorensen “Sam” Adams, the New Jersey prankster who invented and marketed Cachoo Sneeze Powder, the Joy Buzzer, and the Dribble Glass, made a really dumb decision: he turned down the rights to a Toronto rubber company’s air-filled bladder that, when sat upon, made the sound of a long, loud fart. “The whole idea seemed too indelicate,” Adams said in the 1940s, “so I passed it up.” Sixty years later, however, when a Florida inventor approached Adams’s descendants with a battery-powered farting machine, they were savvy enough not to make the same mistake.