Like a good joke, they’re something you can comprehend but weren’t really expecting. It’s just such a darn cute little sound. Plus, the surprised look on someone’s face when that noise just leaps from their butt.
Each has it’s own nature and you can tell a lot about from whence it came by the tone. Some people were obviously way too relaxed, some way too uptight, and some were just plain exerting themselves.
I can’t believe I have the honour of posting in a fart thread RIGHT AFTER LIEU.
Anyway, I’ve been wondering the same thing as clayton_e …why is it so funny? I don’t break wind in public or laugh when other people do, but when I get home…
the recent thread Will Somebody Please Stop the Farting put more tears of laughter in my eyes than anything else in the last few months. I think there’s a certain innocence at Fart Laughter - nobody get’s hurt like they do in other situations where people laugh at one another. It’s human. It’s a lowest common denominator. Pun Intended, of course.
They are not funny. Those who laugh at them have no humor. You’ve have not seen humor until you’ve seen me light one. Now That, ladies and gentelmen. That. Is humor.
okay, that, and the really high pitched ones
Yeah, the squealers are great because you can tell somebody’s trying to clench.
How can you tell when a woman farts??
Her pantyhose poof up…
Sorry, just had to.
What gets me about farts is the release method people use. Some people just let them eek out slowly, naturally. Some really scrunch up and force them out. Why not just let things happen naturally? Why push them out? Just weird.
As for laughing at ones own, the hubby does. Quite frequently. I laugh at mine because they tend to catch me off guard (laughing, coughing, sneezing, etc), not for prowess or skill in delivery. I prefer to be silent and ladylike.
Why is anything funny? One of the best ways to provoke laughter is the sudden, surprising release of social tension. Farts are one of the most basic - probably the most basic - ways to do this.
Farts are (1) taboo, having to do with bathroom functions; (2) a suprise (usually) to the victims. The startling breaking of the taboo releases tension - those around the farter have less need to maintain their social facade, since by breaking the taboo the farter has downgrader him/herself in social status. (I’m ignoring here the fact that in certain social strata farting ability confers a higher status.)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos, millions of years in the future humans have evolved into furry seal-like beings of minimal intelligence. The one thing they still have in common with us, is that when everybody is lying around on the beach basking in the sun and someone farts, everybody still laughs like hell.
Farts are just funny, that’s all. The notion that a sound can be produced with your ass is hysterical. No, it has nothing to do with repressed toilet training hysteria, or whatever was proposed earlier in this thread.
Look, everyone farts, so what’s the big deal? If you fart as a child and your father, mother, uncle, whoever, indicates that it’s funny, then you’ll always be amused by farts to some degree or another.
If your parents were very uptight about such things, then you likely will be as well, and that’s a shame, because you’re missing out on a lifetime of hilarity. Everyone knows that a good laugh is a healthy thing, and it just follows that a healthy fart is a good thing, so why hold either in?
I certainly don’t advocate, say, farting on an elevator, but at home, or with friends, it’s funny. I’ve found that many people who are uptight about farts are also uptight about lots of other things, like sex, and stinking up the bathroom, and worrying about what people think of them in general. Liberate yourself today: let one rip!
This sounds like a really bad Mentos commercial.
On these boards I once read that someone claimed that their farts smelled like roses and came out heart shaped. Maybe, if that was the case for all mankind, they wouldn’t be funny.
Roses, not funny. Paint melter, funny.
He-Gassen (The Fart Battle), 1810, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
I have no idea why farts are funny, but there is some sort of universal funniness to them considering that the Japanese were laughing about them two hundred years ago.
I think it’s because we humans have this view of ourselves as created in God’s image: intellectual, in control of our lives, and totally different from the other animals. When we produce a noise and smell that’s usually involuntary and reminds us of the basics of our own biology (and by extension, our own mortality), it makes us crack up. The association with defecation, considered a taboo for hygienic reasons, just adds to it.
Addendum: To summarize, farts are funny for the same reason all jokes are – they show that we’re not always in control of the chaos of the universe, and remind us of the terrifying brevity of existence.
And apparently, “some people” includes Chaucer and Rabelais.
