Blame It on the Dog by Jim Dawson

Whoopee Cushion, and the new taglines were “It’s a real stinker!”—a rare flash of critical honesty—and “This movie is a gas!” Seth Walther’s name was relegated to small print and the spotlight moved to “The Farley Brothers,” Kevin and James (brothers of the late, lamented comic Chris Farley, star of
Tommy Boy
), even though they were second and third bananas with little appeal.
    Devon Berube, a self-appointed critic from New Hampshire, said it best in his Internet Movie Database ( http://imdb.com ) review: “Basically this is a really bad college movie that attempts to use fart jokes to staple everything together.… It’s like someone threw a bunch of ideas into the air and filmed the ones that landed in the circle onthe floor.” Another contributing voice, Cameron Scharnberg from Adelaide, Australia, was equally unimpressed: “This movie is an absolute pile of crap.… I didn’t laugh once, which doesn’t happen very often because I have a pretty immature sense of humour.” And a reviewer named Chinpokêmon complained because “
F.A.R.T. The Movie
does not meet with the fart joke quota one would expect from both the movie’s title and premise. It instead is a tame romantic comedy with a few fart jokes thrown in.”
    So what prompted Spectrum Films of Mesa, Arizona, to repackage a bad frat house romp as an even worse fart frolic? Could it have been simply “farts for farts’ sake”? In a
Los Angeles Times
feature that ran on September 10, 2000, film director Reginald Hudlin (half of the Hudlin Brothers, known best for their
House Party
movies) announced that flatulence was still the funniest thing in Hollywood. “Broad comedy is safer because there’s a greater margin for error,” he said. “Even bad fart jokes get a chuckle.”
    Only a couple of weeks earlier,
Variety
editor Peter Bart had written, “Today, there’s growing evidence that the fart jokes are driving out legitimate comedy.”
    And earlier that year, at the seventy-second Academy Awards ceremonies on March 27, the event’s producer, Richard Zanuck, got ABC’s approval for comic Robin Williams to sing the word “fart” when he performed an Oscar-nominated song, “Blame Canada,” from the film
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
.
    Given all that, why not green-light movies like
F.A.R.T. The Movie
and
Fart: The Movie?
    An old Jewish expression says you can’t shine shit. You can’t shine farts either—but that won’t stop Hollywood from trying.

FEETS, DON’T FART AT ME NOW!
    I n my chapter on Hollywood (“Gone with the Wind”) in
Who Cut the Cheese?
I credited Mel Brooks’s 1974 Western parody,
Blazing Saddles
, with being the first mainstream American film with a fart joke. But after revisiting Jerry Lewis’s
The Nutty Professor
from 1963, I have to revise my cinematic history. In one scene, as Lewis’s title character, nerdy Julius Kelp, sneaks into a college lab, his shoes seem to be making suction noises on the tile floor that sound like wet farts. To avoid discovery he takes them off, but as he continues to tiptoe forward in his socks, you can still hear those crepe-sole crepitations, prompting Lewis to give the camera a dumbfounded double take. (Before we declare Lewis
le comique genius
, however, let me remind you that England’s famous
Goon Show
comedian, Spike Milligan, used this same gag in a British film called
Postman’s Knock
a year earlier.)
    Anyway, four decades later, life imitated art, sort of, when Goosebumps Products—an insole manufacturer in Longwood, Florida, whose slogan is “Changing the way the world walks”—discovered that its famous Easy-Flo Gel insole, which normally “massages the foot with each step,” was suddenly sounding like a farting contest. “They were Whoopee Cushions for the feet,” Goosebumps executive Bryan Thomas told the
Orlando Sentinel
in early 2005. “It very nearly put us out of business.” Goosebumps had to throw away at least 35,000 of its molded