Blame It on the Dog (23 page)

Since Kip lived far away in Florida, Dan the Farter became the program’s go-to man whenever Stern needed somebody who could fart on cue, even though he continued to have problems with his untrustworthy sphincter. Stern would send him into the green room every now and then to act like an employee restocking the courtesy drinks in the small fridge for the show’s waiting guests. Bending or squatting down to stack the bottled water inside, Dan would blissfully ease out one fart after another while the guests (who included Zsa Zsa Gabor) reacted in various ways—all captured by a hidden camera. Whenever a guest complained, Dan would act as innocent as a lamb and deny he’d done anything. Stern occasionally brought him in to fart along with musicians promoting their latest CDs. Dan also once gave an amazing display of farting in a bathtub. But the only F-Emmys Dan ever won were for soiling himself during some of his stunts.

By 2002, there was a cocky new kid on the block named Junior the Farter, an ace at rapid firing. On March 13 of that year, Junior, age twenty-two, visited the studio after bragging on the phone that he could break Kip Kolb’s five-minute record from two-and-a-half years earlier. “He sucks!” Junior announced defiantly. Taking a bent-over stance in order to control his abdominals, he started blazing like a Gatling gun, firing off more than one fart per second, a pace he was able to maintain for the entire five minutes. Barely halfway through, just shy of two-and-a-half minutes, he broke Kip’s record of 225, then kept on going. When the timer hit the five minute mark, Junior had loosed an amazing 464 farts. It looked like the kind of landmark that might stand the test of time, like Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak or Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs.

Listening that day was a young man desperate to find meaning in his life and make a name for himself. Inspired by Junior’s astounding
five-minute feat, he felt he could do better. His name was Will. It would take him another two years, but eventually he would be able to achieve the title “Will the Farter.”

Raised by his mother in North Hollywood, California, Will relocated to Maryland after he left high school and drifted from one paycheck to another. It looked like he was going nowhere. Gambling too much, picking the wrong girlfriends, and moving in with the wrong roommates, he was a loser. Other than once winning $20,000 on a $2 lottery card, Will could never get his shit together. He was even homeless for a year, living in his car. But Will did have one special talent from his childhood. “I remember looking for something under my couch when all of a sudden a huge amount of air went straight into my ass,” he says. “I discovered I could blow the air back out.” When he displayed this special talent for his cousins, they laughed. “I found out my farts were actually funny. I would do stupid shit like sit on the drain cover in my bathroom and fart into it. That would rattle the pipes.” His favorite place was church, where he’d lay in wait until everyone stood up and sang hymns. “Huge loud farts would leave my ass,” Will recalls. “Most of the time they were covered up by the singing, but the smell was horrible—but funny.” Then one day, the twenty-four-year-old hard-luck kid, obsessed with beating Junior the Farter’s old five-minute record, called Howard Stern and issued a challenge. Stern invited him up to the studio a few days later, on March 18, 2004.

As soon as Will went on the air, he tried to distinguish himself from the poot pack by declaring that he was “Will the Fart Man” rather than “Will the Farter.” But Stern, concerned that the appellation was too close to his own Fartman character, insisted on “Will the Farter”—and so it remained. Playing a clip from an earlier show of Junior ripping a few wet ones, Stern asked Will if he really thought he could do better than that. Will bragged that his farts were bigger and had a lot more volume, and that he once let off a single fart that lasted twenty-four seconds.

Given five minutes to challenge Junior’s 464-fart record, Will hunkered down on the floor, ready to rat-a-tat-tat, as a Stern show staffer manned a timer. But first he needed to clear his “throat.” Though Will, like most contestants, used outside air instead of
intestinal gas, his first fart stunk up the room and raised a ruckus. But once Will got going, the odor subsided. With his ability to let more than one fart per second, they added up quickly. By two minutes he was up to 142. But then his fart flume began to flag. After four and a half minutes he was still in the 300s and beginning to fizzle. When time ran out he only had 357 farts, far short of Junior’s 464. Still, Howard Stern said he was impressed with Will’s sphincter control and tonal quality. So Will, in a final and desperate effort, claimed that he had enough energy left in him to set a new record for the longest fart. He took a deep breath, first at one end and then at the other, and let it go. The whining wind gust lasted only eighteen seconds. You or I would have been proud of ourselves after such a tour de force, but Will was disappointed in himself. He knew he was made of sterner stuff. He knew he had more in him. So Stern let him make one more attempt before he wrapped up the segment. Sound effects sidekick Fred Norris began playing some bombastic new age music by John Tesh to inspire Will to new heights. He took another deep breath and let it rip. Ten seconds, twenty. The fart squeaked and squealed and whimpered and sputtered. Twenty-five. Will was straining now, veins bulging and his face turning beet red. His fart tapered off into silence. The egg timer said thirty seconds. The studio went wild with congratulations. Even today, Will’s half-minute performance is, as far as anyone knows, the world’s record. (If you want to savor its aural magnificence for yourself, you can download it on MP3 from half a dozen sites on the Internet.)

Only moments after Will ascended Mount Olympus with his world-class fart, Junior the Farter, feeling a diminution of his own stature, called in to boast that he was going to beat Will’s record when he came in the following week. Will answered him with a long fart. Junior responded with an even longer comeback. And then, as Norris played a tape of “Dueling Banjos” from the film
Deliverance
, Will and Junior’s farts joined in a brotherly duet of “Dueling Bungholes.”

Later that year, in November, it was Will the Farter’s thirty-second flubberbubber, not Junior’s 464 firecrackers, that won the F-Emmy for Best Farting Moment. Since nobody could get Will on the phone, actor William Shatner, who has his own fart history (see
chapter 27
), came in to accept the award (a green bust of a black, bucktoothed
midget named Beetlejuice, who’s a regular on the show) and remarked that the F-Emmy indeed conferred the “sweet smell of success” on Will the Farter. (See
www.willthefarter.com
for more of Will.)

Can the beginning of a sports franchise be far behind? Hey, if ESPN can televise the U.S. Open of Competitive Eating, with people jamming hot dogs and pies into their big mouths, why not the U.S. Cavalcade of Crepitation?

I TAWT I TAW A POOTY BUTT

H
ey, poopbutt.”

Or should I say “Hey, pootbutt”?

We’re seeing the words
poopbutt
and
pootbutt
more often these days. A poop was originally a fart. As I discussed in
Who Cut the Cheese?
the Mother Goose nursery rhyme about Little Robin Redbreast originally read, “Niddle, noddle went his head, and poop went his hole,” before the publishers cleaned the last part up to “Wiggle, waggle went his tail.” According to Nathan Bailey’s 1721
An Universal Etymological English Dictionary
, the word
poop
meant “to break wind backwards softly,” obviously taken from its earlier meaning, “to blow or toot, as a horn; a short blast in a hollow tube” (from the Middle English
poupe
).
Poop
would later evolve into a soft word for
shit
, both noun and verb, and be replaced in the flatulence lexicon by
poot
—now described as a soft, almost soundless fart. Hence, in one respect,
poopbutt
and
pootbutt
are very much the same.

The fact that both terms are used interchangeably, with different spellings—
poopbutt, poop butt, poop-butt
, etc.—is a result of their not being codified by lexicographers and etymologists until the terms entered more general usage in the 1980s. From all indications, both terms originated in African-American culture. Right now,
poop butt
seems to be the more popular term. Urban Dictionary (
www.urbandictionary.com
) defines a
poopbutt
, or
poop butt
, as “a sucker who lacks street smarts and is easily played; a mark.” Among whites,
it’s more often used to mean “slacker” or “dipshit.” As an adjective,
poopbutt
means “half-assed,” “piddling,” “unworthy of respect”—as in a “poopbutt town” or a “poopbutt job.” Rapper Ice Cube, on the 1989 NWA album
Straight Outta Compton
, used the word in a song called “I Ain’t tha 1,” in which he bragged about how he exploited women before they got the chance to use him. “I ain’t the one, the one that get played like a poopbutt, see, I’m from the street, so I know what’s up.”

In the 1988 film
Moving
, actor Ji-Tu Cumbuka told Richard Pryor, “Who you think you talkin’ to? I’ll stomp a mudhole in yo’ ass, poopbutt!”

And going back earlier, in the early 1980s, a radio disc jockey team in Connecticut went by the name Poop Butt Perry and Bobby T.

I first heard the term about that same time when I was working with an old Los Angeles blues singer-pianist named Willie Egan, who had recorded in the 1950s. Egan used
poopbutt
so often, we named one of his recorded boogie-woogie numbers “Poopbutt Serenade.”

Like Ice Cube, black mystery writer Jervey Tervalon grew up in south-central Los Angeles, but for him the word is
pootbutt
instead of
poopbutt
. In his 2006 book
The Pootbutt Survives: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Hood
, he roughly describes a “pootbutt” as a kid “who didn’t gangbang” and had to keep a low profile because of it. Avoiding certain neighborhoods and streets, and staying away from house parties were all part of “the psychology of being a pootbutt who wanted to survive,” he wrote in a December 2005
Los Angeles Times
article based on his memoirs. Remembering one incident when he was confronted by a young Crip with a gun, Tervalon was able to walk away unharmed because “I was a pootbutt, not a Blood, and so not worth shooting.” Early West Coast hip-hop artist King Tee used the term in his 1988 song “Payback’s a Mutha”: “DJ Cool Pooh, if you ever get souped up, you’ll look like a poot butt, you’ll ask me to stop.” Five years later, two other West Coast rappers, Havoc & Prodeje, recorded “Poot Butt Gangsta” for their
Livin’ in a Crime Wave
album. In 2004, Maryland novelist Van Whitfield wrote in
Dad Interrupted
, “You’ll be two steps ahead of every poot-butt fool in D.C.” Trying to find a regional handle on either word is fruitless.

Most likely, both
pootbutt
and
poopbutt
originally referred to a child who didn’t yet have control of its bowels. Tervalon agrees. “I’m sure the meaning of
pootbutt
comes from the smell of diapers of babies who should be home being attended to by their mothers, but who are out in the streets attending to matters beyond them,” he said recently.

By the time you read this,
poopbutt
or
pootbutt
may already be in your vocabulary, too. But if you read somewhere that a group of English professors is debating which word—and which spelling—is correct, you’d better drop it quick—or else everyone will know you ain’t nothin’ but a pootbutt poopbutt.

HEY, FARTHEAD
,
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

F
latulence just naturally brings out the creativity in people. Kids are always coming up with ways to amuse friends or outrage their elders with butt creaks, and some adults continue the tradition into doddering old age. But those of us who are more mature or inventive look for ways to either alleviate flatulence’s stinky effects, or use the gas in some productive way.