📜 History & Culture

Farts in History

Flatulence has been part of human culture since the earliest written records — appearing in ancient jokes, royal edicts, literary masterpieces, and philosophical treatises. Far from being a modern taboo, farting was openly discussed, satirized, and even celebrated throughout much of human history.

The World's Oldest Joke

The oldest recorded joke in human history is a fart joke. Discovered on a Sumerian tablet dated to approximately 1900 BCE, it reads: 'Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.' The joke's antiquity is remarkable — it demonstrates that flatulence humor has been a universal human constant for nearly four thousand years. The Sumerians also recorded several other flatulence-related jokes in their collections, suggesting that the genre was well-established rather than an isolated incident. Ancient Egyptians similarly featured flatulence in their humor, though their surviving examples are fewer.

Ancient Rome and Greece

Both Greek and Roman literature engaged with flatulence with surprising frankness. Aristophanes, the Greek comedy playwright, featured numerous fart jokes in his works — including The Clouds (423 BCE), where a character farts in another's face as a philosophical argument. The Roman Emperor Claudius, according to historian Suetonius, considered issuing an edict permitting flatulence at banquets because he had heard of a man who endangered his health by suppressing gas out of politeness. Whether the edict was actually issued remains historically disputed, but the fact that it was contemplated at imperial level speaks to flatulence's social significance in the ancient world.

Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) features one of English literature's most famous fart scenes in 'The Miller's Tale,' where a character passes gas in another's face — a scene played for maximum comic effect and social commentary simultaneously. The tale was considered racy but not scandalous by contemporary standards, suggesting flatulence humor occupied a comfortable middle space in medieval culture. Benjamin Franklin, in his famous 1781 essay 'Fart Proudly' (formally titled 'A Letter to the Royal Academy'), proposed a scientific challenge to discover a drug that would make flatulence odorless — arguing that such research would be more practically useful than much of what the Royal Academy actually studied.

The Victorian Suppression

The 19th century introduced the social taboo around flatulence that persists in many cultures today. Victorian etiquette manuals explicitly forbade discussion of bodily functions in polite company, and the open flatulence humor of earlier centuries became associated with vulgarity and low social class. This suppression coincided with the medicalization of digestion — flatulence was increasingly discussed in clinical contexts rather than social ones. The irony is that Le Pétomane, history's most famous professional farter, achieved his greatest fame at the height of the Victorian era — performing for European royalty and packing the Moulin Rouge nightly, suggesting the appetite for fart humor survived the official prohibition intact.

Historical Facts

Fun Fact

In Japan, there exists a centuries-old scroll called the 'He-Gassen' (The Fart Battle), dated to the Edo period (1603–1868), depicting a detailed illustrated battle in which contestants compete using flatulence as a weapon. Some art historians interpret it as political satire directed at European influence in Japan — each powerful fart representing cultural resistance. It is currently housed in the Waseda University collection and can be viewed in its entirety.

Sources

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