Blame It on the Dog (4 page)

This particular practical joke goes back centuries to the “fool’s bladder,” a balloon made from a pig bladder that jesters reportedly used to entertain royalty. But it didn’t have any commercial value until 1926, when a “musical seat” appeared in a mail-order catalog from Johnson Smith & Company in Wisconsin. Looking like a small drum with a bellows attached, the unwieldy contraption “sounds like you sat on a cat,” according to the catalog. A couple of years later, the JEM Rubber Co., in Toronto, came up with a smaller, more joker-friendly, green rubber version with a wooden mouth, which it first called the Poo-Poo Cushion and the Boop-Boop a Doop (inspired by the popular Betty Boop cartoon character and the singer Helen Kane, on whom she was loosely based). Then, around 1932, in the depths of the Depression, when people needed something to whoop about,
JEM renamed its impudent little wheezer the Whoopee Cushion, taken from a then-popular expression for sex or money canonized by Eddie Cantor’s 1928 hit record, “Makin’ Whoopee.” Suddenly, the little fart bag captured the public’s fancy. It was this very cushion that Sam Adams had unwisely rejected a couple of years earlier.

As you might expect, the original JEM Whoopee Cushion is fairly rare and valuable today. Collector Stan Timm, who owns one, said recently that the imprint on his 1932 cushion is “quite striking, being a Scottish kilt-clad boy wearing boots with spurs and carrying a rifle. He is also carrying a mischievous smile.” This same picture appeared that year in the Johnson Smith novelty catalog. Says Timm, “This was the first time they advertised the Whoopee Cushion and they offered it in two versions—the economy model for 25 cents and the deluxe model for $1.25. We believe the one we have is the deluxe version because instead of just rubber it is made of a rubber-impregnated fabric. If you’re wondering, it no longer works. The mouth is brittle and the rest is stuck together.”

Now let’s fast-forward half a century to a night in 1990 when the idea of bringing barnyard fart technology into the space age sprung into the dreaming brain of a Del Ray Beach, Florida, man named Fred Jarow. “I woke up in the middle of the night,” he said later. “I was laughing, but I didn’t know why. I’m not sure that I wasn’t farting at the same time.”

What the world needed, his subconscious had whispered into his inner ear, was a fart machine to replace the Whoopee Cushion. Now that computer chips could reproduce any sound you wanted, why wait for an unsuspecting victim to sit down on a bag of air? Why not set an electronic, remote-controlled booby trap? Jarow himself was in the textile manufacturing business and knew next to nothing about electronics, so he turned to a friend, John Blackman, for help in developing his vision. They came up with a sleek, black, plastic device with a chip that could generate four different fart sounds triggered from twenty feet away, by someone in the next room or outside a window. Some poor slob is sitting there surrounded by his family or a group of stuffy folks he has to impress, and suddenly all these farts are rip-roaring from beneath his part of the table. Oh what fun! Though Jarow and Blackman initially called their invention the
Electronic Whoopee Cushion, they settled on the more direct and precise Fart Machine.

Jarow claims that the toughest part was coming up with just the right sounds. He says that he and Blackman holed up in a recording studio after ingesting plenty of cabbage and beans, but their farts didn’t have the proper gusto or audio frequency. They eventually turned to the synthesizer to create some electronic imitations. “Originally, we wanted to have a really long fart, but it sounded too much like a motorcycle,” Jarow told the
Village Voice
. “Shorter ones are much more realistic.”

Like the Whoopee Cushion, the Fart Machine fit prankster sage Sam Adams’s idea of what makes a perfect prank item. In the June 1, 1946, edition of
The Saturday Evening Post
, Adams, then sixty-seven years old, said, “The whole basic principle of a good joke novelty is that it has to be easy and simple to work. If you have to go through a lot of complications to set the stage for the gag, the public will not go for your item. The best idea is to work with an ordinary everyday object that is around the house.

“When I am fooling around with a new idea, I try to picture Mr. Average Man sitting around a cocktail lounge or in somebody’s house before their weekly game of poker, and I try to ask myself if this new item will go in that sort of group; so if Person A pulls the gag on Person B, Person B will get a kick out of waiting for Person C to walk in and get the surprise of his life.”

In 1999, according to the
Village Voice
, the S.S. Adams Company announced that sales of their electronic Fart Machine had gone over 100,000 units. Business was booming.

One guy used it to perpetrate a fraud. In mid-October of 1998, he phoned Howard Stern’s morning radio program, calling himself the Phantom of the Colon, and claimed that he could beat the show’s then-current farting champion. But when Stern invited him to the studio to do his act, it quickly became obvious that he wasn’t really farting. He had hidden a Fart Machine in his pants.

In recent years, the Fart Machine has become popular in Hollywood. During the filming of
The Score
(2001), actor Edward Norton reported that his costar, Marlon Brando, delighted in figuring out where Robert De Niro was going to be sitting in his
various scenes, and would then tape a Fart Machine under the chair. Brando, incidentally, had already delivered one of the classic early farts of American cinema in the 1976 film
The Missouri Breaks
, when his character told Jack Nicholson, “I feel an attack of gas and that could be perilous to both of us!”—followed by a Method fart.

Actor Johnny Depp is also a big fan of the Fart Machine. He used it on the set of
Chocolat
(2000) to break the tension before his smooching scenes with Juliette Binoche, and then again to relax his costars, including several children, during a dinner scene in
Finding Neverland
(2004). In fact, in one of that film’s DVD special features called “The Magic of
Finding Neverland,”
as we hear the sounds of farting during dinner, Depp says in a voice-over, “We sort of saved the Fart Machine for certain moments. [Director] Marc [Forster] and I planned it out early on that we needed it to loosen that dinner scene up, so we hid the Fart Machine under the table and waited for the boys’ closeups and just started nailing ’em, and it worked like a charm.”

During an appearance on ABC’s
Jimmy Kimmel Live
, on January 28, 2003, wrestler/actor Dwayne Johnson, better known as the Rock, joked about how he interrupted his love scene with costar Kelly Hu on the set of
The Scorpion King
by activating a few electronic farts.

On the March 14, 2004, edition of ABC-TV’s
Primetime
, when host Diane Sawyer asked actress Jennifer Aniston, “Are you an easy laugh?” Aniston replied, “I’m such an easy laugh. I’m the one who has the Fart Machine and the fart sludge and that stuff, and make a pretty big fool of myself laughing ridiculously hard.”

Aniston’s costar in 2005’s
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
, Australian actress Naomi Watts, is also quite a fan of the little noisemaker, according to http://teletextnewsletter.co.uk. In a love scene with Mark Ruffalo, “We were up against the tree, completely naked, trying to act this scene in front of all the crew and cameras,” said Ruffalo. “And then Naomi, to ease the tension, had a Fart Machine going. You’re about to do a scene, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Prrpt, prrt-prrrpt, prrt-prrrpt.’ Instant defuse.”

Among other practical jokers who have zinged folks with Fart Machines are Cameron Diaz, Leslie Nielsen, and, according to an article in the
New York Daily News
, even President George W. Bush.

“The Fart Machine has been an unprecedented success in the novelty business,” says Blackman. “It has been the number-one best-selling gag since 1992 at Spencer Gifts and other gag and novelty outlets. It is sold in fifty countries around the world, and we recently shipped a two thousand-piece order to a palace in Saudi Arabia.”

Blackman is now bragging about an even more advanced version, the Fart Machine No. 2. “Pun intended,” he says. “[It] has fifteen farts now, and they’re louder than ever because we put in our own patented boom-box blaster for better bass response, and you can activate them from one hundred feet away.” There’s even a Fart Machine with a motion detector; like a land mine, it only needs to be activated and hidden away—until a victim comes by and sets it off. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, if you invent a better fart machine, the world will beat a path to your door.

Does that mean the old-fashioned, low-tech gimmicks and gimcracks are going the way of the rotary dial phone? Hardly. There’s still something fiendishly fun about making hands-on fart noises that appeals to the ten-year-old kid in most of us. Whoopee cushions continue to sell in all shapes and colors (even bright colors that would seem to subvert any stealthy prank). There’s even a self-inflating cushion, not to mention a Halloween whoopee cushion costume for the discerning trick-or-treater. And then there’s the little Fart Bag, which you simply squeeze with your fingers. “With just a bit of practice, you’ll be making sweet music with this hand-held Whoopee Cushion,” says the Johnson Smith Company catalog ad copy. Actor Leslie Nielsen has even demonstrated the Fart Bag’s impromptu qualities on TV for Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Rosie O’Donnell. But clearly, in a nation that loves to fight its wars from a thousand miles away, the idea of blasting farts under people’s chairs from the next room or the house next door has an undeniable appeal.

In 2003, veteran television writer-director Daniel Chasin made a mockumentary about Fred Jarow’s invention of the Fart Machine, called
It’s Tough Being
Me, for Laughing Hyenas Films.

When asked to reveal his own favorite Fart Machine prank, Jarow recalled hiding one in a Thanksgiving turkey. “I hit the remote just as the host began carving.”

Now try doing
that
with an old Whoopee Cushion!

FAUX FARTS IN A FLASK

I
n January 2003, museum officials at the Dewa Roman Experience in Chester, England, created a stink when they added the appropriate redolence to their reconstruction of a Roman latrine. It was so realistic that several visiting schoolchildren became sick on the spot. “The smell was disgusting. It was like very strong boiled cabbage, sweet and sickly,” supervisor Christine Turner said in a BBC interview.

The offending substance, called Flatulence, was a product of Dale Air (
www.daleair.com
), a company in Kirkham, England, that manufactures “themed aromas”—liquids atomized into the air by hidden dispensers. More specifically, Flatulence was concocted by Dale Air’s owner, Frank Knight, who works with a team of perfumers in a one-room lab filled with beakers of sundry smells and a bottling machine. Though he’s not a chemist by training, Mr. Knight has formulated the reek of a dead body for an English zoo, the smell of an Egyptian mummy for the City Museum of Stockholm, Sweden, and the odors of a swamp and a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s breath for an exhibit in London’s Natural History Museum. In all, he has made nearly three hundred different fragrances and stenches, including Granny’s Kitchen (which nursing home doctors sometimes use for stimulating the memories of Alzheimer’s patients), Havana Cigar, Sweaty Feet, Japanese Prisoner of War, and Old Drifter. But none of them sent people into woozy fits like the vapors of Flatulence.

Though two of his other patented smells, Boiled Cabbage and Rotten Eggs, are part of the recipe, Knight is tight-lipped (and closed-nosed) about the panoply of Flatulence’s ingredients. And no wonder—he claims that it’s his biggest seller. Recently he added the odor to London’s Imperial War Museum’s exhibit on World War I trench warfare, where mere Mustard Gas apparently wasn’t offensive enough.

“I won’t go near [Flatulence] without wearing a white coat and latex gloves,” Knight said recently. He made no mention of a gas mask.

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