Blame It on the Dog (7 page)

So beware of all those eensy-teensy-weensy farts massing together under the sea, ready to come and get us!

THE FICKLE FINGER OF FARTS

P
ull my finger!”

According to
The Babe
, the 1992 biopic of baseball legend Babe Ruth, “pull my finger” was Ruth’s favorite joke, not to mention a screenwriter’s shorthand for emphasizing the home-run slugger’s crude, hardscrabble beginnings and his good-natured rapport with his fans. Along with an autograph, he was likely to offer his finger and give his admirer a clubhouse-clearing souvenir.

“Pull my finger” is perhaps the best-known catchphrase in the world of wind-breakers, more common even than “Who cut the cheese?” Someone, usually a friend or family member, extends a forefinger and invites you to give it a yank. But like most jokes, it’s good only once per customer. After you’ve tugged and received a fart for your effort, you probably won’t do it the next time.

We know that the middle finger salute, also called “giving the finger” or “flipping the bird,” goes back a couple thousand years. The
digitus infamis
or
digitus impudicus
(infamous or indecent finger) showed up occasionally in the literature of ancient Rome. “Laugh loudly, Sextillus, when someone calls you a butt boy, and stick out your middle finger,” the first-century poet Martial wrote in
Epigrams II, 27
. In case you don’t know, giving someone the finger means either “fuck you” or “up your ass,” shortened in American and British parlance to “up yours.”

But the origin of the
digitus fartus tuggus
(okay, I made that one up) is hard to get a firm grip on. I’d like to think that God is telling Adam, “Pull my finger,” in Michelangelo’s
Creation of Adam
on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel—but if the artist included a talk balloon saying as much, Pope Julius II must have made him paint over it. As I pointed out in
Who Cut the Cheese?
we do know that the extended hand or finger has been around since at least the nineteenth century. Émile Zola referred to it in his 1887 novel,
The Earth
, when a windy fellow named Jésus-Christ proffered his hand to his daughter and said, “Pull hard, draggle-tail! Make it go off with a bang!” Was she jerking on only one finger or several, and if only one, which one? Again, we don’t know.

Regardless, “pull my finger”—meaning the forefinger—has become the rage in the twenty-first century.

Musically, there’s a waltz titled “Pull My Finger,” recorded by Wisconsin’s Da Happy Schnapps Combo Polka band. In Canada, Pull My Finger, an indie rock band from Vancouver, has an album titled
Let Er Rip
, and comics Bowser & Blue sing “Pull My Finger,” the highlight of their 2004
Pull My Finger
CD.

Canada is also the home of “Pull My Finger,” an award-winning TV commercial for an Internet boutique beer seller (
http://beer.com
) that ran several years ago. It was a spoof of all those earnest Internet company ads from the dot-com boom era, when idealistic young entrepreneurs wanted to show the people of the world working together in cross-cultural cyber harmony. Its punch-line scene was an African villager offering his finger to a loved one. When she gave it a pull, a flock of birds frantically flapped into the air from a tree directly behind him.

On NBC’s popular
Friends
, one of the lead characters, Chandler (Matthew Perry), extended his finger a couple of times. For example, in the episode entitled “The One with Joey’s Award” (Season 7, Episode 18), Monica (Courtney Cox) says, “Hey sweetie, come here! Come sit down. Hey, Phoebe and I were just talking about how our relationship is deep and meaningful. It really is, don’t you think?”

Chandler responds, “Oh, totally! Pull my finger.”

The toot tug has also invaded Japan, if director Yasujiro Ozu’s
Good Morning
, with its young brothers in suburban Tokyo engaging in a finger-plucking competition, is any indication.

Then there’s the 1999 “musical toot” CD called
Pull My Finger
, featuring ninety-nine tracks of assorted fartings with corresponding names like “Heiny Hiccup,” “Bugle Boy,” “Donald Loves Daisy [Duck]” (you can imagine what that one sounds like), “Dotting the I,” “Champagne Cork,” “Colon POWel,” and “Slide Trombone,” plus a musical salute to Christmas called “Silent Butt Deadly Night.” According to producer Richard Halpern,
Pull My Finger
(http://pullmyfinger.com) has sold over 250,000 units. Its 2001 sequel,
Pull My Finger 2: Barfs, Farts & Belches
, included even more farts, along with two fart-along tunes: “Crapper’s Delight” and John Philip Sousa’s “Stars & Stripes Forever.” “This time we miked a couple of toilet bowls, including the one at a sandwich shop near our studio,” says Halpern. “We didn’t have to add any echo; it was all natural.” Currently he’s hawking
Pull My Finger Vol
. 3:
Smelly Holiday
, which includes tracks like “The 12 Farts of Xmas” and “Sugarplum Farties.”

The first album’s rip-roaring success led Halpern to move to Hollywood and co-produce a forty-five-minute documentary film called, oddly enough,
Pull My Finger
—the story of his national Pull My Finger tour in early 2000, during which he visited not just the
Howard Stern
show, but also the
Donny & Marie
[Osmond] show, a syndicated talk program. “It’s really the story of my passion to get on the Stern show,” says Halpern. “I had a tough time getting on until I came up with the idea of bringing on two fat girls who could fart on cue. Gary [Dell’Abate, the producer] loved it, and that’s what finally got us [Halpern and his production partner, Dan Rogers] booked, but then we had to find two fat girls and come up with an elaborate way to get them to fart.” Their segment, like a pointed finger, almost got pulled while they were still in the green room, when Dell’Abate insisted that the girls prove they could fart before he’d let them go on the air, and only one of the girls was able to squeeze one off. They did make it onto the show, but Stern was unenthusiastic. “The best thing that came out of our appearance,” says Halpern, “was that Donny Osmond called me to say he heard the show and loved it. I sent him
three hundred CDs to pass around to his friends, and that led to us getting on the
Donny & Marie
show. The most amazing thing is that we got a lot more response from being on
Donny & Marie
than we did from
Howard Stern
, though to be fair we did pretty well after Howard asked us to come back a second time.” Halpern originally hoped to license footage from popular movies to show how flatulence has become a big crowd-pleaser over the past quarter-century, but he ultimately settled on just one scene: the farting cowboys from Mel Brooks’s 1974 classic
Blazing Saddles
. Furthermore, to give the film
Pull My Finger
a patina of respectability and intellectual weight, Halpern and Rogers interviewed yours truly to get a historical perspective. “The documentary is finished and ready to go, but what’s holding it up is getting the licensing rights for Howard’s E! show,” Halpern says. “Really, all the events lead up to that first appearance, and without it the movie would be incomplete.” In the meantime, he’s working on other film projects (
www.bluedaniel.com/zzyzx/
) and a new Pull My Finger game in which “farticipants” have to name famous melodies performed by fart samples.

“Pull my finger” has also become a buzz phrase on the lucrative gadget and prank circuit, thanks to Pull My Finger Fred, a loquacious doll with an extended digit, sitting in his recliner as he dispenses farts along with such verbal gems as “Bombs away!” and “Who stepped on a duck?” (Fred’s voice belongs to a Chicago voice-over artist named Mark MacLean.) According to Geoff Bevington, Fred’s co-creator (along with Jamie Wirt), “For a company built on the premise of one idea—a farting doll—we’ve grown considerably.” He says their Illinois-based company, Tekky Toys (
http://tekkytoys.com
), has sold over 300,000 units worldwide and has spawned an ever-growing family of Pull My Finger dolls, including Freddy Jr., George W. Bush, Fat Bastard (from the
Austin Powers
movies), Santa Claus, Count Fartula, and Fartenstein. “We have a lot of pull in this industry,” Bevington deadpans.

Wait a second, is he pulling my leg?

BEST-SELLING DOG FARTS AT MAN!

D
og bites man, that’s not news. But when a farting dog makes the
New York Times
Book Review section, that’s a sound bite.

On April 15, 2004, a forty-page children’s book called
Walter the Farting Dog
—the story of a lovable but gassy family pet who can’t even gobble down a bag of low-fart dog biscuits without stinking up the house—went to number one on the
New York Times
list of best-selling books. It also topped the reading charts at the
Boston Globe
and
Publishers Weekly
. “[Walter] can’t help it,” said the ad line from the publisher, North Atlantic Books. “It’s just the way he is. Fortunately, Billy and Betty love him in spite of it. But their father says he’s got to go! Poor Walter, he’s going to the dog pound tomorrow.”

Fortunately for Walter, the authors had seen the film
Home Alone
, so they introduced a couple of hapless burglars who break into the house the night before the hound is bound for the pound and, well, you know what happens next, even if you haven’t forked over $15.95 for this skimpy book. Walter chases the poot-phobic perps, “choking and gasping for air,” into the clutches of the police.

Funny, I don’t remember Dick and Jane having such problems with Spot. There was never “Look, Jane, see Spot fart.”

Walter the Farting Dog
had first been published two-and-a-half years earlier, in late 2001, for kids from four to eight, but their parents, who apparently remembered their own crepitating canines from childhood (or at least the family pets who took the rap for every
fart in the house), embraced it, too. The book became so popular it was translated into several languages, including Latin (
Walter Canis Inflatus
).

Two
Walter the Farting Dog
sequels followed. The first was
Trouble at the Yard Sale
(2004), in which Walter ends up in the hands of a thief who tricks him into blowing up balloons with a special “fart catcher” by telling him they’ll be used at a children’s party. But what the guy is really planning to do is take the balloons into a bank and burst them to overwhelm the tellers with clouds of choking gas. Then came
Rough Weather Ahead
(2005), the story of what happens when a special doggie diet food that’s supposed to cure Walter’s flatulence only makes it worse. Walter’s digestion gets so bad that he bloats up like a balloon, floats out the window, and hovers in the sky for days, until he’s able to release all the hot gas inside him to save millions of butterflies trapped in a freezing windstorm.

“All in all, it’s a gas,” said
Booklist
, without mentioning that the book’s most dramatic scene may have been inspired by Cervantes’s prologue to the second part of his sixteenth-century masterpiece,
Don Quixote
, in which a madman goes to the center of Seville, gathers a crowd, grabs the rear legs of a stray dog, inserts one end of a hollow reed into its anus, puts the other end in his mouth, and starts blowing. The crowd watches, transfixed, as the dog inflates like a balloon. When its belly is grossly round and full, the man lets it run away, with air escaping in a noisy rush from its ass. Then he turns to the crowd and asks, “How think you, my masters, is it a small matter to blow up a dog like a bladder?”

Walter the Farting Dog
has inspired similar children’s books. When the two
Walter
sequels moved to Dutton Books’s juvenile division, North Atlantic Books replaced him with
Little Lord Farting Boy
, about a flatulent bear named Arty, written by one Scootchie Turdlow. Then there’s
Pee-Ew! Is That You, Bertie?
by David Roberts (published in 2004 by Harry N. Abrams), about a boy whose farting is so plentiful and odoriferous, everybody else feels free to fart in his presence because they can put the blame on him. Meanwhile, the sales of earlier children’s books like Francisco Pittau’s
Terry Toots
, Taro Gomi’s
Everyone Poops
, Susan K. Buxbaum and Rita G. Gelman’s
Body Noises
, and Shinta Cho’s
The Gas We Pass
have picked
up. I guess it’s time I dusted off my own manuscripts for a couple of sure-(butt) fire kiddie classics called
My Pet Pet Goes Putt Putt
and I
Tawt I Smelt a Pooty Tat!