*Farting and the Enlightenment

My older daughter has had a sense of humour since her toddler days when she would hide a baby spoon behind her back and produce it with an “ah ha, gotcha!” grin. But I saw a sudden jump in her understanding of comedy when she was three years old.

We were in the park and she was sitting on the tire swing with a couple of her friends, three year old boys (in the days when boys and girls played together indiscriminately), and their older, wiser, more sophisticated five year old sister. She said, “Poop.” And the three year olds burst into wild gales of laughter. She said, “Poop,” again. It was just as funny the second, third, fourth and fifth times. It still hasn’t stopped being funny, years later, and I suspect it never will.

So when I saw The Benefits of Farting Explained by Jonathan Swift in the Oneworld Classics catalogue, I had to see what the 17th century satirist had to say on the subject.

Oneworld Classics issues new translations and lesser known works by authors in the canon, like Jonathan Swift, and this is one of the latter. It’s a small book that consists of two essays, the first being “An Essay Upon Wind” by Charles James Fox and the second the essay that is the title of the volume, which is by Swift (who wrote Gulliver’s Travels).

I wasn’t familiar with Fox, an 18th century writer, whose essay is witty, astute and, I have to frankly admit, hilarious:

Farting is certainly an ancient practice, but not, as some authors have asserted, as ancient as the world, for I believe before the devil appeared in the character of a large snake neither of our first parents farted — for as they were divinely made, it cannot be reasonably supposed that they had such common and nasty operations as man had since the Fall.

It is written in the guise of a treatise for an academic society and it has all the earmarks of categorization, historical analysis and experimental evidence in vogue at the time. (Some attention is given to assertions on the relative weights of different types of farts and what device might be used to test them.) I thoroughly enjoyed it and though I’m considerably older than the kids on the tire swing, and the satirical essay involves more erudition, there is, after all, a lot of commonality underlying the basic humour: in contrast with our lofty thoughts, manners, and aspirations, we human beings make funny sounds and smelly smells.

Swift’s essay was interesting just because he is an important literary figure. It wasn’t as clever or as funny as Fox’s, and seemed to consist mainly of puns and surnames that included the word “fart” or a synonym. I think it might have been funnier if I knew more about 17th century conventions. But in any case it was Swift and his reputation and the fact that he had written a satire on, of all things, farting that got my attention. And that was worthwhile because it introduced me to Fox.