Cool. Make with the funny.
For me, it’s all about context.
Fart jokes in a movie? They leave me cold. As an act of conscious humourism, farts don’t rate very well; I expect writers to try a little harder than that.
In the context of real life, they have the potential for hilarity, though.
How about Aristophanes, Chaucer or Shakespeare? Would you consider them to be sophisticated? All of them used fart jokes. Farts have always been funny.
They are so overused. EVERY “Holes/Stand by Me…etc” type movie on up to Buddy cop movies uses this as a standard “isn’t this hilarious?” joke. To me, they’re just not funny, not due to any prudishness but rather the lack of originality inherent in the “jokes” themselves.
To answer your Shakespeare question. I don’t remember a specific fart joke from these writers, but I’d probably have to say that I would find a fart joke from them funny. Why?
It’s all in the way they present it, clever wordplay that takes something mundane, stupid, and unoriginal, and makes it into something clever and amusing.
Chaucer’s most famous fart joke is probably in “The Miller’s Tale.” Absalom takes one in the face, unwittingly kissing a cheeky girl’s ass. Maybe it’s funnier because it’s in verse. Maybe it’s funny because he’s confused about why he encountered something rough and hairy. (“A woman shouldn’t have a beard… Wuh?”) Maybe it’s funny because she farted in his face. 
Rabelais managed to make a few silk purses out of sow’s ears, too.
Cecil’s take on Le Petomane is one of the all time greats. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_394.html
It is, of course, beneath me personally…
Re Geoff Chaucer: I thought that was the carpenter’s tale? Gotta go back and re read it.
The one I recall was where the old geezer was persuaded that Noah’s flood was coming. He was hiding out high in the house. The girl (the carpenter’s young, underserved wife) hits Ab with a fart when he shows up courting the first time at her window while she’s inside w/ Nicholas and Ab hears them chuckling at him. Ab leaves angry and wanting revenge. When he shows up again, Nick decides it’s his turn to drop a pooter. When Nicholas lets flee the fart" on Ab’s second visit, Ab is ready and hits him in the a** with a hot poker or something. Nick goes nuts and calls for water. The geezer hears “water” decides the flood is coming, and cuts the rope that’s holding his rowboat or whatever up high in the house. I sorta forget the details, but I think I remember the gist. Now THAT’S a fart story for the ages.
As I recall, the miller’s story is about a guy who ends up in bed with the miller’s wife, thinking he’s in bed with the miller’s daughter. The wife is tickled pink at the free…well; I better quit now.
That guy could write. Shame the really good ones don’t make it into high school lit.
It is a good point, but personally I think it falls into the category of “Basic Physics Questions We Just Don’t Understand.”
Like why do opposite magnetic polarizations attract? Why not same polarizations?
Why does gravity attract instead of repel?
Why is Planck’s constant exactly…well, you get the message.
Some things are, I think, just unknowable.
(remind me to tell you some time about the one I cut on the MARTA in Atlanta after a big meal of garlic shrimp)
I can’t wait until “some time.” Now!
Well, OK, since you asked…go ahead and give me a time out for hijacking the thread…or from “racist” comments; along with my apologies, I’m just reporting what was said…
Dang, you just had to ask…
2001: I had an assignment in Atlanta, for the State of Georgia. The MARTA (local rapid-transit) had a stop right there in the building. The airport (ATL) has a MARTA right there, so if I could find a hotel with a MARTA stop, I could avoid a $250+ plus cost per week in not having to rent a Hertzmobile. Which I did. Embassy Suites. So I took the MARTA to and from work.
One night in ES, I ordered room service. Shrimp Scampi and and steak. Umm, good food. Really. This was probably around 8 pm. I went to bed around 11 pm, with no…um, intestinal problems. Next day, I woke up, took MARTA to work. Noticed “gassiness” but no problems, the emittances were odorless.
Worked all day, got on MARTA to go back to ES. Felt a little-bitty fart needing to come out. I eased it out, no sweat, right?
Felt like an ordinary fart.
A few seconds later, ( must have been exhaling), my eyes started to water. Something more poisonous than chlorine gas was clearly attacking my musous membranes. Further, my lips got a funny feeling, kinda like somebody had put viper poison on them.
Then, I inhaled.
This cloying, greasy, unbelievable odor went through me and my olfactory organ just flat shut down in disbelief! But it was too late. It burned a passage through my smell right into my brain. Which promptly shut down, leaving me, with tears coming from my eyes.
I only hoped the stench would dissipate before it hit my fellow passengers. Who was I kidding? 1 cc of this would have sufficient to evacuate New York City.
Two rows down from me were two locals (the train was not crowded, thank God).
Ten seconds later, one of them went, “DAMN!!”
The other went, “That be rank!”
“Rank?” said the first, “You daddy be the King of the Chili Farts. The King be dead!”
Other one, “Long live the new King. Now I gonna die.”
“You talk your BS about dying? F**k you, mo-fo, you getting off at Lenox, you be done with this shit! I am going to the end of the line. GOD, that be rank! I amdyin’ here!”
“Look at 'em” (pointing to all the other PAX), “Ain’t no one uppin’ up to this. Not that I would, either.”
“They just trying to forget this happened.”
“F**k you, asshole. You getting off in 2 more stops. Now I know why I should of made me a will.”
“Look at 'em. Ain’t nobody raising they hand, shit, I be raising my hand at this achievement…if I wasn’t about to die.”
“Long live the king!”
Well, one of the regrets of my life is why in heck I just didn’t raise my hand. Dang, they did deserve that. I should have not let my embarrasement override what was right. They were so cool, they deserved to know who the dude was that did that world class fart. Bad on me.
The Miller’s Tale and the Carpenter’s tale are sort of connected, through the prologues. The carpenter takes a poke at millers with his story, and so the miller pokes back with his tale, which shows a carpenter in a bad light.
Stellar performance, LiveOnAPlane! It’s almost like being there – without the aroma. Well told.
No it wasn’t. The dialect was painfully inaccurate. Now I know how British people feel watching Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
When I was at college, my buddy and I shared a space that had originally been a long room that had been subdivided by a very thin partition wall, and though my bed was in the middle of my room, his bed was up against that wall.
Every single morning, 7.30 am, I heard the following from the next room:
Pthththtpppbbbbbbt. Hee hee hee hee hee.
I quizzed him about it and he said the fart was spontaneous in his sleep, but was so powerful that it woke him up, and he couldn’t help laughing. In the end I stopped putting my alarm clock on. When he farted and laughed, I would start giggling too, and then we’d meet up for breakfast.
What a great way to start the day.
Accidental farts are very funny to me. I can hardly contain myself when someone does it in church or some other place thats really quiet, a class room the library…too funny! Whats not funny is when some allusive person in the grocery store, just ahead of me keeps farting and leaving the area and I unsuspectingly walk in to it.
Uh, you’re quite incorrect.
Maybe I’m just hanging out in the wrong spots, but are you actively looking for these farters? 
I’ve only heard two actually while out in public that I can recall. The first was back in 4th grade when some poor girl unleashed one during class – now that was funny. The second emitted from an old man reading a book at the library I worked at. That was just awkward.
Shakespeare definitely used them. See Eric Partridge’s book Shakespeare’s Bawdy for references. (It’s a good book in its own right – Shakespeare made a lot of risque jokes that the Folger Shakespeare Library and Pelican editions don’t always clue you in on.) The only fart joke I can recall is in Hamlet, and goes something like this (forgive my faulty memory)
“Then came every actor upon his ass.”
“(Bzz. Bzz)”*
“Many a wood-instrument hangs by a tail.”
- This is the sound of a “raspberry”, which is clearly a fart sound. Some editions even point this out.
I’d have to agree that the surprise element can contribute to their hilarity. A bunch of guys sittin’ around a ballgame, eating nachos and pushin’ gas isn’t very funny but when my little girl’s sneeze would press one out, “Achooprrrrrrrrrrttt”, that used to crack me up.
Tonal quality can be key as well. Once, an old girlfriend’s mom was sitting behind us on the couch as we watched a movie on the floor and she successively coughfarted three times, but each one went way up in pitch as she tried to clench down on it, tried to nip her gas bud… “Cough-blattttt… couch-twoooot… cough-thweeeeeet!”
Literally, we were hearing her embarrasment.
I think it’s what you call bathos. We’re all trying (even little kids) to get through life with some modicum of dignity, and then you fart and the whole thing goes out the window.