After a few rings, a phone call to Don Corrigan gets answered. But it isn’t Corrigan’s voice on the other line. Alarm noises blare, and a loud robotic voice announces, “Fart detected! Fart detected! Evacuate!”
It’s a fart detector, Corrigan explains after he lets the alarm sound for a confusing 10 seconds. It’s the same fart detector he writes about in his latest book, “I Fart in your general direction!”: Flatulence in Popular Culture.
The book is the veteran journalist’s third in a trilogy on popular culture. The first two books, Nuts About Squirrels and American Roadkill, examined each topics’ portrayals throughout history.
Corrigan is professor emeritus of Webster University and editor emeritus of the Webster-Kirkwood Times weekly newspaper. He recently dished to the Riverfront Times about all things farts — and his path to fascination with flatulence.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I guess my first question is why. Why write an entire book about farts?
A lot of people have asked me about that. My brother-in-law chewed me out on that when I gave him a copy of the book. He said, "Nobody wants to read 75,000 words on flatulence and the type is too small.” He’ll be surprised. It’ll be on the New York Times bestseller list before he’ll know it.
I did my first flatulence story 30 years ago in the Webster-Kirkwood Times. It was about flatulence during the holidays and how to deal with it. There’s a lot of crises in the world and nothing’s worse than opening your community newspaper and finding a story about flatulence and bloating. I got a lot of heat — a lot of blowback from that story. But it proved to me that people are either really hot or really cold on whether flatulence belongs in general discussion.
A state legislator, Bud Barnes, gave me a biography of the French fartist Le Pétomane. He could sing with his flatulence and blow out candles from two feet away. When I read that, I said that when I’m no longer a college professor full-time, I’ll write a book about this because there’s so many interesting things about it.
When the head of AG Pharma, who developed Beano, read that article, they sent me a lifetime supply of Beano. It didn’t last me a lifetime. I guess I needed more than they realized.
I interviewed doctors who deal with this for that article. And I got a kick out of how excited they were to be interviewed. Nobody really wants to write about this stuff. They were so happy to see me, and when I put them on the front page of the paper, they just loved me. That’s another reason why I wanted to write this book. They deserve more credit.
Everybody wants to read about how they can improve their looks, but they don’t worry about how to improve their gasworks, which is something they should be more concerned about.
That was a very long-winded answer.
What was something you learned while researching for your book that surprised you?
Well, I was born knowing a lot about flatulence. I refuse to be fart-shamed. Some people have tried to shame me for this. They say, “You’re more talented than this, you should be writing about more serious issues.” But I always say, “Look who’s written about this.” Chaucer wrote about it in The Canterbury Tales. And Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, JD Salinger. I include them in a chapter on literary flatulence.
Ben Franklin, my hero, wrote Fart Proudly. Here’s a guy who invented the wood stove and bifocals but he still had time to write about flatulence. In his treatise to the Royal Academy of Science in Europe he begged them to spend more time researching flatulence. He said there had to be a way to get rid of what he called “a stinking in the breeches.”
In the past few years, you’ve also written books about squirrels and roadkill. What attracts you to these topics?
I’m the kind of man who will go places no one else will go.
Anyway, here’s my fart machine. I’ll give you just a couple of examples.
Alright, let it rip.
[Corrigan then proceeds to play a variety of different fart noises on his fart machine, naming each. There was the “rip off,” the “brown growler,” and the “barking spider.”]
Did you name these yourself, or are there actual names for various flatulences?
Well, I’m probably the first writer who’s scientifically classified them and named them. There’s a chapter on that where I talk about the characteristics of each one.
That’s a pretty good fart machine, don’t you think? They sound pretty realistic.
I’m not convinced you’re using a fart machine. That sounds way too realistic.
It’s the marvels of modern electronics.
What do you hope people will take away from Flatulence in Popular Culture?
In the book, I give the 10 Flatulence Commandments. One of them is, of course, honor thy proctologists and gastroenterologists.
Thou shalt not lighten up one’s own gas. Thou shalt not break wind in an elevator or a closed space.
I can’t believe God didn’t cover all that in the original 10 commandments. Must’ve slipped his mind.
Moses probably sanitized the real commandments. I think these were actually in the original commandments before he brought them down from the burning bush.
Luckily we have journalists like you out there, looking for the truth thousands of years later.
Correct.
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