Blame It on the Dog (9 page)

As a side note, the original English term for the razz was the
buzz
, or
buzzer
, which showed up in Act II of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, when the Danish prince invited a donkey-riding theatrical troupe to his castle to reenact the murder of his father.

But thanks to the rise of the razz in the twentieth century, the buzz is no longer the bane of every bad actor, but rather what everyone in Hollywood today is desperately seeking.

All of which brings us back to the Razzie Awards
^®
, handed out each year twenty-four hours before the Oscar
^®
broadcast by the Hollywood-based Golden Raspberry Foundation. According to John Wilson, the Razzies
^®
reward the film industry’s worst achievements, offer discerning cinephiles an antidote to the fawning and self-congratulatory Academy Awards
^®
ceremonies, and illustrate just how silly and pretentious that goddamn
^®
is. (The symbol for “registered trademark,” it looks like it belongs on the haunch of a Texas steer, not attached to the name of a golden trophy celebrating the Hollywood art of kissing its own ass.) So what better way to scorn Tinseltown movies and the people who make them than by figuratively saying—to quote John Cleese’s famous line from the 1975 film
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
—I fart in your general direction!

“When I registered the term with the Library of Congress in 1980,” says Wilson, “they asked me, ‘Why
raspberry
? What’s the significance of that?’ ”
Razz
was then not as commonly used as
Bronx cheer
—coined many years ago at New York’s Yankee Stadium, where baseball fans were prone to making fart noises at the umpires. “But since then,
razz
has pretty much permeated the culture,” Wilson boasts, then adds magnanimously, “We couldn’t have done it without Hollywood’s help.”

Incidentally, one film experience that would have rated a loud raspberry if the Razzies had been around twenty years earlier was the aforementioned
Scent of Mystery
. The movie itself was probably not lousy enough to garner an award, but Smell-O-Vision—a system whereby garlic, pipe smoke, and other scents were pumped into the air from tiny plastic tubes hidden under the theater seats—turned out to be one of Hollywood’s biggest stink bombs. The machine made an audible hissing sound, and not everyone in the audience got the scents at the same time or at the same intensity. One critic suggested that the only future for Smell-O-Vision lay in dosing the audience with laughing gas. Proving that some things are best left to the imagination, Smell-O-Vision evaporated quickly and was never used again.

To keep the Razzies fresh as they head into the second twenty-five years, Wilson hopes he can come up with new ways to tell the film industry to pull his finger. “Right now I’m thinking about adding the sounds of people farting movie themes on our website” (
www.razzies.com
), he says.

At last year’s Razzie Awards, held on February 26, 2005, at a former burlesque joint called the Ivar Theater, Halle Berry was fingered as Worst Actress for her role in Warner Bros.’s
Catwoman
, which also got razzed for the Worst Film, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay of 2004. President George W. Bush got the Worst Actor Razzie for his performance in Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit
9/11, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld garnering Worst Supporting Actor honors. The only winner with enough aplomb to show up and graciously accept her award was former Oscar winner Halle Berry. You might say that Berry got her Razzie and the Razzie folks got their Berry.

Wilson says there are currently seven hundred voters from around the world, including industry insiders, film critics, and just plain movie fans who like to make rude noises in theaters. The Razzies are often described as “tongue-in-cheek,” but in fact one must first remove the tongue from the cheek in order to give a raspberry. In fact, the Razzie has gained enough stature that it’s become a kind of media standard for Hollywood awfulness. For example, to underscore the overall ineptitude of actress-screenwriter Jenny McCarthy’s
Dirty Love
(2005), critic Richard Roeper said, “They’ll need a whole new category in the Razzies.” The
Los Angeles Times
began its review of the film with, “Attention, Razzie voters!” (
Dirty Love
did win a buttful of Razzies earlier this year.) The award—a really cheap-looking, golf ball-sized raspberry on top of a mangled Super 8 film reel, whose gold veneer looks like it was spray-painted on at a skid row chop shop—has an estimated street value of $4.97. Besides Miss Berry, hardly ever do the winners show up, which goes to show you what a bunch of sore winners Hollywood’s A-listers really are. Or maybe they take it personally when the rabble makes farting noises at them.

HABIT-FORMING FRITTERS

A
h, those French. Where else would a certain kind of dark brown cheese be called
crottin
—or horse turd?

But a more popular item is their
pet de nonne
, or nun’s fart—a dainty, sugar-dusted fried fritter. It’s also less commonly called a
soupir de nonne
(nun’s sigh) and a
pet de soeur
(sister’s fart).

The nun’s fart is related to the donut, whose origins go back to a Dutch pastry from the fifteenth century called an
olykoek
(oily cake), so named because it was cooked in oil. According to legend, a nun living in the abbey of Marmoutier (wherever that is) was preparing food for a religious feast when she let a fart slip out in the presence of several other nuns. Embarrassed by her faux pas, she dropped a spoonful of dough into a large pot of boiling oil and accidentally made a fritter.

More likely somebody affixed the name simply because of the little pastry’s airy texture and sweet scent. Since nuns were thought to eat plain, godly food in meager portions, jokes typically had them farting in hushed wisps under all those garments. Probably more than one viewer of late-1960s television’s
The Flying Nun
wondered if what was keeping Sister Bertrille (Sally Field) aloft was too many of those wisps accumulating inside her starched habit.

Since I’d like you to have the pleasure of inviting people over to sample some nun’s farts, here’s a recipe that will provide you with about forty of them.

PETS DE NONNE (NUN’S FARTS)

As with any traditional dish, there are many variations of nun’s farts. Cajuns more typically call these pastries
pets de soeurs
, use ample amounts of lard, and mix in plenty of cinnamon. Other names include
bourriques de soeurs
(nuns’ belly buttons) and
bourriques de viarges
(virgins’ belly buttons). The Germans also have fritters called
Nonnenfurzen
(nuns’ farts), but they fill theirs with cream or jam.

Speaking of Germans, they make a bread so heavy that it can produce hellacious flatulence that may require an exorcist. The English translation for its name is “devil’s fart,” which may account for why Americans use the German word instead:
pumpernickel
, taken from
pumpen
(to fart) and
nickel
(a goblin or devil).

WANTED: FART SNIFFERS, NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

I
t’s probably tough enough being an odor judge in the research labs of mouthwash companies, testing their products by getting gargle-scented halitosis breath exhaled directly into your face. But Dr. Michael Levitt, a gastroenterologist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis, has taken this drudge job to a whole new level—down to the other end of the long and winding road of human digestion. According to
Popular Science
magazine, in early 2005, Levitt hired two hardy souls to smell other people’s farts. “Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration,” staffer William S. Weed wrote, “but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: not enough.”

Under Levitt’s guidance, sixteen healthy volunteers ate pinto beans and inserted small plastic tubes into their anuses; after each “episode of flatulence, Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity,” according to Weed, a journalist determined to get to the bottom of the story. The two judges then received at least a hundred air samples, opened the caps one at a time, took a nice breath (well, a breath), and rated each fart’s noxiousness. Levitt also chemically analyzed each sample and discovered that the worst smelling part of a fart was hydrogen sulfide.

(You have to wonder if the two judges put this job on their resumes. I can see one of them applying for his next position; the interviewer looks up nonplussed and says, “You seem like a real fart smeller, er, I mean, a real smart feller.” In English, we call this transposition of first
parts of words a
spoonerism
, named for an absentminded reverend, W. A. Spooner, who was prone to saying things like, “It’s kisstomary to cuss the bride.” But the French call these verbal accidents
contrepeterie
, which literally means “cross-farting.”)

Anyway, despite skepticism from many quarters, Dr. Levitt, who’s one of the world’s top authorities on flatulence (see
Who Cut the Cheese?
), insists that he isn’t just farting around. Though gastroenterology is the study of stomach and bowel ailments, he says that up until now his fellow practitioners have never analyzed colon gas to diagnose medical problems. “The odors of feces and intestinal gas and breath could all be important markers of gastrointestinal health,” he claims. Hydrogen sulfide, for instance, is very toxic and could lead to ulcerative colitis, among other ailments.

Perhaps the Greek doctor Hippocrates, for whom the Hippocratic oath is named, was right after all when he wrote in 420 BC, “[It] is better for gas to pass with noise than to be intercepted and accumulated internally.” In other words, keep farting as if your life depended on it.