Stupid Question ™
By John Ruch
© 2003
Q: Was there really
once a performer who made music by passing gas?
—Liam
A: This gives a whole new meaning to the term “artsy-fartsy.”
There are actually several such “flatulists” known to history. The most famous is Joseph Pujol, a French sensation who was known as “Le Pétomaine” (“The Fart Maniac”).
A light but scholarly account can be found in Ricky Jay’s indispensable book “Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women,” from which I got much of my Pujol information.
Born in 1857, Pujol discovered his “gift” at an early age when, while he bathed, water forced itself into his anus. He soon learned that he could control his sphincter and abdominal muscles to allow the water to enter, and then to forcibly spout it back out.
Pujol realized he could do the same thing with air, producing a variety of sounds and even quasi-musical notes. Like all flatulists, he was not actually passing digestive gas, but only sucking in air and blowing it out again. It’s a form of whistling, really.
A baker in
He ditched
the mainstream stuff and became Le Pétomaine. In
1892, after a few hard years, he scored a gig and lasting fame at
Pujol’s act was pure comedy and began with impressions of the supposed gas-passings of a nun, a bricklayer and a bride before and after her wedding night (quiet and loud, you see). He also imitated cannon fire and sang a song about barnyard animals accompanied with suitable sound effects.
He produced “music,” though a reviewer wrote that it was limited to four notes. He was apparently more tuneful when he dropped the flap on his black satin breeches and played a ditty on a carefully inserted flute.
He smoked cigarettes with his bottom via a rubber tube, and blew out candles and even the gas footlights from a considerable distance.
Pujol silenced skeptics by performing privately in seatless pants. (Doctors even wanted his dead body for science, though they never got it.) There were, however, fraudulent imitators who used concealed bellows.
But there was also a genuine imitator, a woman known as Le Mère Alexandre.
Pujol wasn’t the first of his breed. Jay found literature on Kirifuri-hanasake-otoko, a late-1700s Japanese performer who did a “water mill routine” in which he did cartwheels while producing suitable aquatic sounds.
Japanese TV
in the 1980s presented a man who fired darts from a blowgun. Today’s reigning flatulist is
Jay noted
the similarities to “quiffing,” an art practiced most
famously by the stripper Honeysuckle Divine. Long featured in “Screw” magazine,
she squirted peanut butter and Ping-Pong balls, blew out candle flames at six
feet and played “Jingle Bells” on a kazoo—all, Jay notes, “using
an orifice not even possessed by Pujol. Or, for that matter, by any man.”