Learning Day: F.A.R.T.s The Movies 🌭

“The universe isn’t irreparably corrupted by darkness,” you say. But you’re wrong. In 1991 someone made a movie called F.A.R.T. The Movie. “We can come back from that,” you say. But you’re wrong again. In 2000 someone else made a movie called F.A.R.T. The Movie. “We are fucked,” you decide. And you’re finally right. Behold, doomed readers… F.A.R.T.s The Movies:

F.A.R.T. The Movie is a 30 minute collection of frantic, unfinished fart sketches. F.A.R.T. The Movie is an inept college sex comedy with seven or eight farts unrelated to the plot. If you took out the farts from both films, they would both be called The Movie, but one would be 99% of a fartless romantic comedy and one would be a sucking hole in the walls of our reality. Which reminds me, this is going to get confusing. The first F.A.R.T. The Movie was the second F.A.R.T. The Movie in the last sentence, and in neither movie does the acronym F.A.R.T. mean anything. I know. It’s fucking crazy. Crazy in a way it didn’t need to be.

Speaking of acronyms, both F.A.R.T.s The Movies will be judged using the fart comedy film industry standard of F.A.R.T., explained below (illustration courtesy of searching for “farting butt clipart”):

I don’t need to explain it. We all use this system every day. Let’s get started.

First impressions are vital because that’s all a F.A.R.T. The Movie will have. Even the people who made F.A.R.T. The Movie barely remember anything about it, and that’s not a joke. The zany sketch one listed renowned film expert, Drew McWeeny, in the writing credits and I know him on Twitter, so I immediately sent him this:

Do you know what this means? It means F.A.R.T. The Movie was made by mere intent. A fart-mad lunatic knew there should be a movie about butt smells but had no other artistic inspiration other than “maybe someone who reads magazines could write it.” It’s incredible, both that he bothered to try and how badly it came together. I’ll talk more about Drew’s contribution later, but first let me show you the back of the box:

In many ways it’s the most honest a VHS box can be. From the copy to the screenshots you can tell this thing looks like shit and was hacked together by someone with no sense of humor other than the one built into every human asshole. It’s like it’s trying to explain bad comedy to a baby. “Russell loves to FART! But his wife hates FARTING! It’s the eternal triangle-90’s style, which is not a real turn of phrase or where you put that apostrophe.” Two things are made clear by F.A.R.T. The Movie‘s box: they think a half hour of farts alone is enough for a film, and they’re wrong about a lot of things.

Now I want to talk about the far less honest box of the other F.A.R.T. The Movie. You might have already noticed something suspicious about it:

The tiny betrayals here hit you in waves, and I don’t want to steal that experience from you, so please take it in before I make any comments on it.

Really, stop here and focus on each detail. Think of why they made every choice.

You might have thought, “Oh, this was directed by the Farrelly Brothers? How have I not hea– wait, did they spell their name wrong? Hold the fuck on. Does that say… IN?” You may have also noticed at the top of the box they listed three actors you’ve never heard of rather than the world famous Farley Brothers. That might be because those Farley Brothers are Chris Farley’s brother, Kevin, who you may have seen in a couple things, and Chris Farley’s other brother you didn’t know he had. The second one can’t act and he’s spliced awkwardly into the movie every twenty minutes to have no effect on anything. Then again, that’s how I would describe the farts in this F.A.R.T. The Movie. So by stinky butthole standards, he is the principal star. Congratulations, Other Farley Brother. Clunk? Pojob? That’s it. Pojob Farley.

It’s worth looking at these pull quotes too:

I couldn’t find either of those film reviews, but that doesn’t mean anything. Online media in the year 2000 was just a place where confused people lit money on fire. Still, I’m guessing from the way they didn’t spell Shoreline Times correctly and the fact that GoodNewsBroadcast was a Christian website, these aren’t perfectly accurate. Do you know what a Christian website tells you when you ask them to review F.A.R.T. The Movie? They ask their God for permission to fuck you up, and He always says yes. Seriously, though; they don’t sit through a slightly fartier Porky’s knockoff and tell their readers it’s like falling in love.

F.A.R.T. The Movie is something a fungal colony would make if it was pretending to be its movie director habitat. The hero is a balding incel with a farting backstory that never comes into play and his sidekick is a balding Kevin Farley doing an impersonation of Chris Farley doing an impersonation of William Shatner. The idea that fucking anyone, for any reason, would say it’s “a cross between Animal House and Something About Mary that all generations can relate to” is absurdity. An obvious deception told by a fungus with no more reason to lie. If Sue Braden really said this, fuck her and the mold steering her. And Tim Conway Jr. from 97.1 FM Talk Radio Los Angeles… do I need to explain why it’s bad to invoke a supporting actor’s dead brother to promote a terrible movie his manager would have never let him get anywhere near? I don’t know if it’s committing any actual crimes, but to use the language of this era of cinema: F.A.R.T. The Movie‘s VHS cover has the ethics of a basketball coach with multiple magic dogs on the bench.

The back of the box is really something, but in a different direction:

Wow, look at all those fart non-fart jokes ordinary words. Like the other F.A.R.T. The Movie, it tells you more than it means to about who the filmmakers are and what they’ve done. It tells you it was made by people who think farts are funny, but aren’t quite ready to make them fundamental to the story, but hold on, maybe maximum farts? No take them out completely wait, we were right the first time, fart. I can’t stress enough how tacked on this farting stuff is. Despite naming their film F.A.R.T. The Movie and making the cover a fart-filled whoopee cushion (a double fart in many ways), these insecure nerds were ready to cut F.A.R.T. The Movie down to 108 minutes and release it as Sex Predator Buddies as soon as any distributor asked.

Seventy four Kevin Smith movies have proven you can eventually say something funny after you try enough times. Sorry, when I started that sentence it felt like it was going to be a joke. I think I’m still cranky from F.A.R.T. The Movie. The point is, F.A.R.T.s The Movies sometimes make dull swings for misunderstood “humor” and accidentally hit truly special insanity. Let’s celebrate those moments.

First, let’s look at F.A.R.T. The Movie. The balding college student with an inconsistent fart problem has ditched his beautiful, kind-hearted soulmate to stalk an emotionally vulnerable hot girl to a bar. The hot girl hates him, as stated by the film several times, because she thinks he’s a loser creep (he is). However, she wants to get revenge on her unfaithful boyfriend, Johnny Alpha (really), who also hates him (he let him get horribly injured during a trust fall activity (really)). His well-known fart condition is only a secondary, easily removable reason for the characters to dislike him. Anyway, she does a sexy dance to seduce him:

He gets so horny he farts on the bartender, killing him, but that’s not the funny part. Or maybe it is to you in which case here’s a joke you’ll love: unanswered cries for help from a chemical toilet. No, the funny part comes next after what feels like seven more hours of dancing. She stops doing a seductive merengue and goes fucking nuts.

In a fit of demonic editing, the scene goes from alluring dance to Paula Abdul audition. To a slow Latin soundtrack, this woman throws high kicks, plays pool, drops the beat, and after she runs out of organic ways to show her panties, just starts pulling up her dress. The whole movie I was thinking, “How does a competent actress who is this much of a smokeshow only have Team Knight Rider and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun on her resume?” I think we’re seeing the answer. The F.A.R.T. The Movie director of photography caught footage of a malfunctioning android moments before its tiberium core exploded.

The other F.A.R.T. The Movie is made up of so many zany sketches it’s almost impressive how rarely they try to be funny. It’s almost all lazy premises like “What if a priest talks about farts and the concept should be enough, right? No need to write jokes?” But there were a couple fart game show bits that blew my mind. As anyone who’s made anything knows, game show parodies are the first idea on the whiteboard of any brainstorming meeting, so I didn’t have a lot of expectations when I saw the set of WHO CUT THE CHEESE.

First off, all the contestants introduce themselves by farting, which is deceptively brilliant. It implies these people come from a world where farts are used as communication. Or maybe it means it was written by someone whose joke construction is farts are funny, so farts are funny, so farts are funny, so farts are funny. Both are equally ridiculous. The host tells them, “Contestants, please, identify this fart.” And then a fart comes, as if from nowhere. Did the host do it? Did they have it contained somehow!? Anyway, they all hate it, and one of them farts in return. This seems to be how you buzz in, so he adds, “That’s a rotten egg fart.” The line is delivered with an indecisive authority no trained actor could have considered.

After a long pause, the host says, “… yeah.”

And that’s it! That’s the whole fucking thing! It is almost violent in how much it doesn’t care. Nothing has ever given less of a fuck. You probably didn’t expect a well-structured narrative going into F.A.R.T. The Movie, but surely no one could have expected so little. They built a set so four people could fart and one of them named a fart. But it’s the other game show parody I really want to talk about.

It’s just exactly the Gong Show, only it’s called BONG SHOW, which is great because it’s not a fart pun, implying this takes place in a world where there are things other than farts. We see a blindfolded woman performing her act which is guessing people’s farts. I’m not explaining it well. What she does is smell their farts and then guess them. Two women in swimsuits bring up a volunteer from the crowd and he farts on her.

She starts to guess his fart. She says, “Mmmm… very fragrant. Definitely a woman. He likes to wear silk panties.”

It looks like it’s a real bit! The old man is secretly wearing lady underpants and it’s messing up this fart-telling act! That’s a premise with a setup and payoff anyone can unders– what’s this? No? It goes off in another direction and then just kind of ends with the celebrities fighting over a gong? Ha ha ha what?

I love this. It’s a second game show about guessing farts, only this one they’re bad at it for reasons the writer and editor didn’t agree on! It had too much depth… too much mystery. So at the risk of hurting author and movie genius Drew McWeeny‘s feelings, I reached out to him again.

I was right! He wrote it! If that’s not strange enough, the sketch also stars the real four-year-old Ke$ha who farts on the old lady and gets her to say, “Wooo! What a lot of musk! You are a verrry virile man.” I don’t know. Maybe all we see and are is a misinterpreted fart on a poorly edited Gong Show parody.

Both F.A.R.T.s The Movies take some real liberties with reason to create circumstances for their fart jokes to have a chance to land. For instance, F.A.R.T. The Movie opens with Russell (who loves to fart) unloading his ass into an elevator before he exits.

These goddamn people watched this man performatively leave them with his noisy fart and then start to perform the great single act play Who Among Us Farted Because I Guess We’re All Fucking Stupid?. I want you to understand, these movies don’t suck because you’re better than them. You are, probably, but they suck because they will fart off of faulty premises. This is a butthole built on sand. This is an Elon Musk tweet promising “I will dig a little tunnel under Florida to reduce swamp traffic” translated into Fart.

There’s a sketch in F.A.R.T. The Movie where a commercial for fart spray claims to recreate the exact fart scents of your dead relatives and pets. How!? Why!? And in the other F.A.R.T. The Movie they get pulled over for drunk driving and have to cover the scent of beer. Easy, right? The protagonist of the film has a fart problem! So they, of course, try to hide the beer smell with cigars. What? They do finally remember the main character farts when he’s nervous, but he shits his pants instead because he’s the wrong kind of nervous. What!? There’s a scene where pooping into a toilet is too noisy(?) so he hangs his ass out the window and shits outside. And this is a travel!

Look, we’re going to be here all day if I try to point out everything wrong in F.A.R.T. The Movie, so I’ll sum it up with a screenshot of the farting college student next to one of the two women he pulls:

Oh, this is the perfect time to move on to:

Each of the F.A.R.T.s The Movies have a tone where it feels like we’re about to sneak up on a lady taking a bath. It’s like two different men said, “Let’s make The Boob Tube or Revenge of the Nerds, keep all the sex crimes, replace all the boobs with farts, and add all the lonely sadness that implies.” But you don’t necessarily need nudity to be erotic beyond all reason. F.A.R.T. The Movie, prove it:

Special thanks(?) to LaziestManOnMars for sending me both F.A.R.T.S. The Movies.