Published 2022 | Version v1
Journal article Open

"Don't Think, Just Fart": Noise and the Comic Value of Flatulence

  • 1. ROR icon The Graduate Center, CUNY

Description

Starting from an elaboration on John Cage’s ominous sentence and on the stigmatization of
humor in intellectual discourses, this article tries to understand the history of farts being
considered funny in Western culture, with an emphasis on the role played by the sound of
flatulence in this comical aspect. After all, if there isn’t something inherently funny about
the sound of farts, a complex association between senses and social relations has
nevertheless made fart-like sounds at best silly and at worst abominable to our ears. What does
this mean for the imagination of fart-like sound effects, such as some of those produced by
pedals and modular synthesizers? Isn’t the moralization of intestinal fermentation a
constraint to the ways the human body can be used as a musical instrument? And how could
an ANT approach enhance our knowledge of how farts “resound” socially?

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