Blame It on the Dog (16 page)

But this fishy tale doesn’t get really fishy until a couple of years later. As Flatulina tells it, “One late night I had a stomachache. I got up, went to the kitchen, cut some cheese, and then it hit me: train fish to sing. The rest is history.” She invented flatomusicology, defined as “the study of music created by bubbles.” She trained fish to mimic melodies and, with underwater recording equipment, recorded the first-ever fish choir. Adding her own explosive talents to the mix, she came up with the “effervescent sounds” of
Flatulina’s Fabulous Holiday Spectacular
(2002)—a CD complete with videos—and decked
the halls with bowel burps. (Visit
www.flatulina.com
for details on getting a copy.)

Despite all the theatrics and the odd conceit of falsetto fish harmonizing with C-flat flatulence, Flatulina’s takes on Christmas standards like Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride” are intricately arranged and professionally performed. Whether the farts are real or not, they sound real—and they’re plentiful.

“The whole idea behind Flatulina was honestly to pay off some student loans,” the poot princess confessed recently from her home in Nashville. “I’m a professional musician, and this was simply a side project for me to generate income. Sort of an intersection of my musical skills, my quirky sense of humor, my business drive, and an old childhood party trick of producing a pallet of fart sounds.” She keeps her real identity secret and separate from her Flatulina alter ego because she doesn’t want to lose credibility as a legit musician. “I want to be able to do other projects with my real name and not have people think, ‘Where’s the funny stuff?’ ”

Though it’s considered unladylike, flatulence has always amused her. “To me, the sound of farts is way funnier than jokes about them. So I wanted to use that element in an unexpected musical setting, like Christmas songs and classical music. But I also knew that I’d need more sounds to work with besides just farts and an orchestra, so I came up with the story of the singing fish and added bubbles and kazoos. That opened up a lot more possibilities in the arrangement. When I was working on the first few songs, I was so deep in the detail work, I couldn’t even tell if it was funny. But then some friends stopped by and I played it for them, and I knew I was on to something.”

She wanted Flatulina to be a cartoon figure, until she realized she’d have to hire animators to bring her to life. “Ultimately, it was easier and cheaper for me to get a costume and pose for the camera.”

Still, Flatulina doesn’t want you to think her music is just one big fart joke. “When I do radio interviews, I tell the deejays ahead of time not to use the word fart, or else they’ll start talking about farts and there’s nowhere else to go. I think it’s funnier to just
conduct an interview and put a bunch of random fart sounds in the background.”

After releasing her CD, Flatulina discovered that she had an unexpected constituency. “One thing that took me by surprise was that after I put myself on the CD cover and started doing interviews, there was this demographic of men who seemed to fall in love with Flatulina,” she said. “I saw reviews on websites that said she was foxy and hot, and deejays who said she was their dream woman. I find that amusing, but I don’t want to cater to any pervs out there.”

She also doesn’t want to be Miss Methane. “It’s important to keep my project kid friendly, because kids do love it. So I’ve tried not to go in directions that associate me with more raunchy or sexual programs or products. That’s why I’ve never tried getting anything to Howard Stern.”

Though her first album celebrates Christmas, Flatulina points out that none of the songs have anything to do with Jesus. “It’s all about sleigh rides and decking the halls. No one’s feelings would ever be hurt from my CD, no racial groups offended, no innocence robbed. It’s just farts set to music.”

The fact that Flatulina hasn’t performed live yet suggests either that she really hasn’t schooled those schools of singing fish very well, or all those farts are just studio trickery that can’t be duplicated onstage. But she claims to have another excuse for not taking her Flatulina persona on the road: “My mother-in-law has no idea Flatulina or this CD exist, and I want to keep it that way. She already doesn’t get me.”

DVD, THE FART
AFICIONADO’S BEST FRIEND

I
n 1968, the flamboyant actor Kenneth Williams, who starred in the bawdy British
Carry On
comedies, was in the middle of a mock seduction scene with Joan Sims on the set of
Carry On … Up the Khyber
when he suddenly let off a couple of doozies. Miss Sims was quite offended, and as she made a big stink about it in front of the cast and crew, Williams tried to leaven the tension by remarking that Rudolph Valentino, the greatest film lover of them all, used to “blow off” in front of his leading ladies all the time.

“That may be true,” Miss Sims countered, “but those were
silent
films.”

It’s a great riposte, but regardless of silence or sound, Williams’s real-life farts never would have made it to the big screen (though an elephant’s fat flatus did put an exclamation point on
Carry On … Up the Khyber’s
opening scene). The editor would have used a different take or simply removed the noises, and that would have been the end of it.

But nowadays, because of the DVD, nothing is wasted and tossed, not even a stray fart, which will almost certainly be picked up, because we’ve got sound and plenty of it, thanks to sensitive microphones and Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

The DVD—which originally meant “digital versatile disc,” though “video” has more recently taken over the V—was introduced commercially in 1997 as a replacement for the VHS videotape, but
movie studios immediately saw new possibilities in the shiny little platter. Like videotape, the DVD extends a film’s life beyond its original theatrical run into what Hollywood calls an “aftermarket.” But equally important, the DVD’s enormous capacity allows the addition of all sorts of little extras not available the first time around. (In all fairness, many of these extras were first introduced on the larger laser disc, but that format never caught on with the general public.) For example, since a film has to be rated by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) before major theater chains will handle it, studios usually trim objectionable content to avoid the dreaded scarlet letters—NC-17 and R—that would prevent the all-important adolescent movie fans from packing the seats. But since DVD movies don’t have to be rated, producers can put all the sexy, gross, and ultraviolent stuff back in—and add a few more extras besides. According to Home Media Research, when two versions of a movie are released simultaneously on DVD, the unrated version accounts for 80 to 90 percent of sales. “People—young males, especially—want to choose what they see, they don’t want censors in their lives,” Home Media Research’s Judith McCourt told the
Los Angeles Times
in 2005.

This repackaging sometimes provides the discerning butt-burp aficionado with not just more flatulence, but louder, more extreme flatulence, along with crepitation commentary. Which means that now, in addition to the history of Tinseltown farting (recounted in the “Gone with the Wind” chapter in
Who Cut the Cheese?
), there’s an alternate DVD fart reality. For instance, take New Line Cinema’s 2004 stoner comedy
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
. The title tidily sums up the plot: After smoking a bag of marijuana, roomies Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) get a bad case of the munchies and head out to find a White Castle hamburger joint. Along the way, they stumble into several ridiculous situations. Running from a college campus cop, they duck into a ladies bathroom and hide in the middle stall. Two coed hotties in short, pleated skirts stroll in, take the stalls on either side of them, and start an unladylike commode competition by ripping a volley of wet, noisy “battle shits” at each other. It’s the ultimate teenage male fantasy: young chicks who love to flaunt their farts and entertain themselves with ass gas as much as guys
do. On the 2005 unrated DVD (with “Extreme Unrated” marked conspicuously on the cover), the producers not only beefed up the scene with some extra rectal rumblings, but added a bonus featurette called “The Art of the Fart,” which demonstrates in vulgar detail how recording engineer Jeff Kushner captured the sound of “real” farts by hiding out with microphones in truck stop toilets. “Imagine an artist’s palette, with instead of different kinds of paint it’s got different farts on it,” he tells director Daniel Leiner. “And you can just choose the kind you want, blend them together, and create the right feeling.” Despite Kushner’s comment that “women’s farts are different” (implying softer, more delicate), we later see him “out in the field,” trying to coax a couple of horses into blasting some real barnyard butt burners into his mic. This behind-the-scenes look at creating cinematic flatulence is, of course, bogus, and the echo-heavy shit-farts he supposedly picks up from the thunder bowls of various bathrooms sound suspiciously like an underground 1978 record on the Uranus label called “The Biggest Bowel Movement Bar None.” It’s likely that “The Art of the Fart” was inspired by the “Behind the Gas” mini-doc on the
Kangaroo Jack
DVD, described in
chapter 6
.

The recent DVD for Amblin/Warner Bros.’s
Goonies
(1985) includes Cyndi Lauper’s MTV music video for “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough,” which included a couple of fart sight gags.

The DVD for
Star Wars, Episode 1
:
The Phantom Menace
(1999) has a bonus called “The Complete Podrace Grid Sequence,” an extended version of the film’s opening ceremonies and podrace, including a shot of an Eopie, a hairy quadruped, farting lustily into the face of Jar Jar Binks as he detaches a pod from its rear quarters. Binks almost passes out from the odor.

On DVD, even cartoon figures are caught farting off-camera. Both Disney’s traditionally drawn
Brother Bear
(2004) and Pixar’s computer-animated
Toy Story
(1995) feature fart-heavy credit-roll gags, despite the fact that the films were aimed primarily at kids. Then again, maybe that was the point. Kids love farts, no matter what the adult censors at the MPAA think.

Universal’s
The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
(2000) was already a flatulence-heavy PG-13 theatrical movie, with a dream sequence in which a fart propels Eddie Murphy’s title character through the
air, as well as a dinner scene where a candle ignites Papa Klump’s gas and blows up a restaurant. But when it came time for the DVD, the studio released an “enhanced” version called
The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps Uncensored
, with roughly two minutes added that would have upped its PG-13 rating to an R in a theater, thanks to a couple of new scenes—recognizable because of a yellow tint—with even grosser gassy humor.

But almost none of these farts are spontaneous or even genuine. Just about every gag reel and deleted scene on today’s home releases are scripted and shot with the DVD market in mind. Even bloopers are usually manufactured. That’s why the DVD’s greatest fart bonus is probably found on
Revenge of the Pink Panther
(1978). In the original movie house version, Peter Sellers (playing Inspector Clouseau) and several gangsters get into an elevator and face the door (where the camera happens to be), staring blankly ahead as elevator riders are wont to do. Suddenly someone farts, and everybody looks uncomfortably at the ceiling or glances at someone else. But in the DVD’s outtakes we see that the fart sound that director Blake Edwards used live to cue the actors was so funny that they all cracked up. And then, over the next couple of takes, it didn’t matter what the fart sounded like, Sellers couldn’t stop giggling and nobody else could keep a straight face.

As a great philosopher (well, maybe it was just me) once said, “One real fart is worth a thousand reel farts.”

NOT SO QUIET ON THE SET

N
ot all of Hollywood’s poot play ends up on DVD. Some of it just gets picked up as gossip and blathered via the celebrity media. And why not? Everything that famous, beautiful people do is magic, even when it smells like shit.