A fart is the funniest thing in the world. Just unbeatable. No sitcom could be as funny as a show called People Farting For Half An Hour – more insightful, perhaps, more dramatic or compelling, maybe, but not as funny, no way. No stand-up is ever doing as funny a job talking into the microphone as they would be if they just farted into it.
Imagine the Queen getting halfway through her Christmas speech and farting. It would be the funniest thing that ever happened – as Roald Dahl knew when he wrote that royal “whizzpopper” into his sublime book, The BFG. If it happened for real, it would be like man walking on the moon – everyone would remember where they were when the Queen stepped on a duck.
Children, especially, find farts hilarious. Father, deputy head teachers and education blogger Aidan Severs recently shared a book on Twitter that his daughters had made, sporting the title ‘The Big Bum Did A Big Fart’. It’s a delightful volume, featuring stories like A Giant Bottom, The Big Poo, The Enormous Wee, The Big Fire Burp and The Pond of Sick.
“All the authors of The Big Bum are girls, aged eight, seven and five,” Severs told HuffPost UK. “However, it was the five-year-old who dictated the chapter titles and the stories.” Let me say here – that child is a creative genius. The Pond of Sick is both surreal and disgusting. But it’s not what features on the cover – the big sell is a bum doing a fart. That’s the real star.
Rather than asking why children find farts so funny, perhaps we should ask why adults don’t. Do we actually stop finding them funny, or do we just tell ourselves that we’re above such things? “I’ve laughed along with 30 kids in my class before when someone has done a really obvious fart,” admits Severs.
One of the great things about farts is that they’re transient and self-limiting. The worst-case scenario for a fart is a lot more manageable than the worst-case scenario for any other bodily function. Farting when you’d rather not fart is embarrassing as it’s happening – and while the scent lingers – but then it’s over, with nothing left but the memories.
Another pleasing aspect of farts: the rude way of describing them is exactly the same as the polite way of describing them. All the slang terms – guffing, trumping, pumping, windy-pops – are about as inappropriate as each other. It’s a hard thing to be highbrow about, though they can be of educational merit.
The series Walter The Farting Dog has been credited with persuading book-averse children to make an effort on the reading front. Olaf Falafel’s magnificent Old McDonald Heard A Parp is also a favourite. Let’s be grateful for guffs.
What’s vastly more fun is when kids revel in doing them. Joe is a dad of two whose six-year-old daughter is going through a very fart-happy phase. “She’ll set up a joke by saying something like: ‘Do you know what I was thinking?’, and then I’ll say, ‘What?’ and she’ll fart,” he reports. “Last weekend she tried to force the joke and poo-ed herself.”
Farts aren’t always entirely voluntary, after all. An adult feeling one brewing in a situation where it might not be welcome can exercise some control and hold it in until, for example, the end of Prime Minister’s Questions. A child won’t necessarily show the same restraint, and shouldn’t be encouraged to – holding in a boff can lead to pain and indigestion and potentially diverticula.
It’s pretty much established these days that speaking euphemistically about body parts and bodily functions isn’t helpful, so why steer away from calling a fart a fart? For the most part, they are natural and healthy, a normal byproduct of digestion, so why shouldn’t we talk about them?
“We don’t want our girls to think that natural bodily functions are taboo, so we freely talk about farts” says Aidan Severs. “My daughters are usually pretty polite in company, but know the family home is a place where we can let our bodies do their thing. We want our girls to be polite with it and not offend anyone – there’s a time and a place – but we don’t ever want them to think that just because they’re girls they can’t do certain things.”
If tempted to over-intellectualise or politicise windypops, farts are the great equaliser – we know they’re something we all have in common, something everyone occasionally lets rip. All those impossibly perfect people on Instagram sometimes fluff. Beyonce bottom-burps. David Beckham passes more than balls. We’re all human, so ideally we can all do the occasional trouser-cough without feeling dirty or ashamed – even if it’s a really, really smelly one.