* In Dante's Divine Comedy, the last line of Inferno Chapter XXI reads: ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta ("and he made a trumpet of his ass"), in the last example the use of this natural body function underlined a demoniac condition.
* In Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" (one of the Canterbury Tales), the character Nicholas hangs his buttocks out of a window and farts in the face of his rival Absolom. Absolom then sears Nicholas's bum with a red-hot poker ("Nicholas quickly raised the window and thrust his ass far out...At this Nicholas let fly a fart with a noise as great as a clap of thunder, so that Absolom was almost overcome by the force of it. But he was ready with his hot iron and smote Nicholas in the middle of his ass."). (Lines 690–707)
* In the translated version of Penguin's 1001 Arabian Nights Tales, a story entitled "The Historic Fart" tells of a man that flees his country from the sheer embarrassment of farting at his wedding.
* Friedrich Dedekind's 16th century work, Grobianus et Grobiana, appeared in England in 1605 as The Schoole of Slovenrie: Or, Cato turnd wrong side outward, published by one "R.F.". The "Schoole" taught its students that holding back the desire to urinate, fart, and vomit was bad for one's health; thus, one has to indulge freely in all three activities.
* François Rabelais' tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel are laden with acts of flatulence. In Chapter XXVII of the second book, the giant, Pantagruel, releases a fart that "made the earth shake for twenty-nine miles around, and the foul air he blew out created more than fifty-three thousand tiny men, dwarves and creatures of weird shapes, and then he emitted a fat wet fart that turned into just as many tiny stooping women."[17]
* Montaigne, in his essay "Of the Force of Imagination", includes a discussion of flatulence. Of "the vessels that serve to discharge the belly", he writes "I myself knew one so rude and ungoverned, as for forty years together made his master vent with one continued and unintermitted outbursting, and 'tis like will do so till he die of it"[18].
* Benjamin Franklin, in his open letter "To the Royal Academy of ******", goes on at length in ye olde eloquent style that is his wont about flatulence. He satirically proposes that converting farts into a more agreeable form through science should be a milestone goal of the Royal Academy. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=470
* In Mark Twain's 1601, properly named [ Date: 1601.] Conversation, as it was the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors, a cupbearer at Court who's a Diarist reports:
In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore.
The Queen inquires as to the source, and receives various replies. Lady Alice says
"Good your grace, an' I had room for such a thundergust within mine ancient bowels, 'tis not in reason I coulde discharge ye same and live to thank God for yt He did choose handmaid so humble whereby to shew his power. Nay, 'tis not I yt have broughte forth this rich o'ermastering fog, this fragrant gloom, so pray you seeke ye further."[19].
* In Emile Zola's La Terre (the 15th volume of the series Les Rougon-Macquart), the eldest Fouan son can fart at will and keeps winning free drinks by betting on his skill.
* In James Joyce's Ulysses, the main character Leopold Bloom breaks wind in the "Sirens" chapter of the book.[20]
* The Gas We Pass is a popular children's book in the United States about flatulence.
* In the cinema, farting has been featured in films intended for adult audiences such as Blazing Saddles. However, this caused some controversy in the United States: when it was run as a movie of the week by ABC the farting sounds were overdubbed with sounds from the surrounding horses, so the scene had cowboys sitting around a campfire standing up and leaning over for no apparent reason (Dawson, 1999, p. 125).
* The film Wet Hot American Summer features a boy lighting a fart as an act in a talent show. Additionally, the film's DVD features an optional "fart track" that adds fart noises to the film's audio.
* An episode of MythBusters featured myths about flatulence and determined the chemical composition of a typical flatus.
* "I fart in your general direction" is a popular phrase from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
"One mans death is a tragedy, a thousand men's death is a statistic."
Posted by: at October 26, 2006 2:24 PM