Mel Brooks’s classic 1974 Western parody Blazing Saddles was groundbreaking in a great many ways. The famous campfire scene, for example, offered theatergoers something that they didn’t get to experience very often in movies back then: audible flatulence. As a group of cowboys sits around a fire scarfing down plates of beans during the sequence in question, they slowly let loose with a symphony of farts that Warner Bros. executives tried to prevent the world from ever hearing (thankfully, they gave Brooks final cut).
Here’s how it ended up playing out on-screen:
Uncommon as that scene was for its time, it wasn’t quite as trailblazing as some people would have you believe. A number of publications, such as Mental Floss and Screen Rant, have reported that Blazing Saddles was the first movie in history to feature audible farts. However, there are actually several examples that predate Brooks’s legendary spoof when it comes to both farts and fart noises. Norman Lear’s star-studded 1971 comedy Cold Turkey, for starters, features a scene in which Edward Everett Horton lets one rip in the crowded back seat of a car:
Cold Turkey wasn’t nearly as successful as Blazing Saddles, so it’s not surprising that it continues to get overlooked for beating Brooks to the punch in this area. But although Cold Turkey was originally shot in 1969, it still doesn’t contain the earliest fart scene in all of cinema. Ten years prior, Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu released a movie called Good Morning that included a few farts of its own:
People Think Blazing Saddles Had Cinema’s First Audible Fart. They’re Wrong.
And if you’d care to get into fart sounds in general, that complicates things even further. The phrase “blowing a raspberry,” meaning to make the noise with your mouth, has its origins in Cockney rhyming slang; in other words, it was so named simply because the term “raspberry tart” rhymes with “fart.” And, for the record, these disrespectful raspberries can be traced all the way back to the silent era. Here’s Oliver Hardy blowing a raspberry at a cop in the 1929 Laurel and Hardy short Double Whoopee:
Two years later, Laurel and Hardy made their first starring feature-length film, Pardon Us, and one of the recurring gags involved Laurel having a loose tooth that inadvertently caused him to blow a raspberry whenever he spoke:
So, in a way, it could be argued that Laurel and Hardy were a fart joke, pioneers. The same can also be said of W.C. Fields, who snuck a clever sequence into 1941’s Never Give a Sucker an Even Break in which a raspberry salesman’s flat tire makes the offensive sound as it passes by him on the street.
But who made the noise first on the big screen is a question that might never be answered, especially when considering how many movies from the black-and-white era no longer exist. For now, what we can tell you with absolute certainty is that the earliest occurrence wasn’t in Blazing Saddles, as opposed to what you may have heard.
The post The Truth About Whether ‘Blazing Saddles’ Had the First Audible Fart in Movie History or Not appeared first on VICE.
