Here at Commonplace Fun Facts, we regularly devote ourselves to noble, serious, and monumental subjects: the rise and fall of empires, the mysteries of science, the oddities of law, the strange turns of history, and the many ways human civilization has managed to trip over its own ceremonial robes. We are, in short, a dignified institution.

We should also acknowledge that our staff is entirely male, and despite our best efforts to appear mature, thoughtful, and properly housebroken, most men remain 12-year-old boys at heart—especially when certain topics arise. Which brings us, with all the scholarly restraint we can possibly summon, to the surprisingly rich and historically documented world of professional farters.

Every civilization has its great achievements. The Egyptians had the pyramids. The Greeks had philosophy. The Romans had roads, aqueducts, and an impressive talent for naming things after themselves. France had the Eiffel Tower. England had Parliament. Japan had woodblock prints. Sumer had writing.

And all of them, in one way or another, had fart-centered humor.

This is not an accusation. It is a statement of historical fact, and possibly the most comforting one you will read today. Human beings have spent thousands of years building empires, composing symphonies, drafting constitutions, and pretending we are above laughing when someone makes an unfortunate noise during a solemn occasion. We are not. We have never been. The historical record is very clear on this point, and the historical record, in this case, is apparently giggling into its sleeve.

Most of us treat flatulence as an inconvenience, an embarrassment, or a strategic act of blame-shifting toward the family dog. But a rare few people looked upon this universal bodily function and saw not humiliation, but opportunity. They saw art. They saw entertainment. They saw a stage, an audience, and a career path no mother ever dreamed of for her son.

These were the professional flatulists: performers who made a living by breaking wind on command.

Yes, that was a real profession. No, we are not proud of how much time we spent researching it. Yes, we would do it again.

Humanity’s Oldest Joke Was Probably a Fart Joke, Because Of Course It Was

Before we meet the great masters of the art, we should pause to appreciate that fart humor is not some sad modern decline caused by television, internet comments, or that one uncle who should never be given a microphone at family gatherings. It is ancient. Very ancient.

One of the oldest recorded jokes in human history comes from Sumer, around 1900 BC. It is usually translated along these lines: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

Is it funny?

Well, that depends on whether you were sitting in ancient Mesopotamia approximately 3,900 years ago, possibly holding a cup of beer and waiting for the punchline to land somewhere between the ziggurat and the sheep pen.

Modern readers may stare at the joke the way a dog stares at a ceiling fan. There is clearly something happening, but interpretation may require tools not immediately available. Scholars debate whether the joke turns on denial, marital familiarity, sexual innuendo, or social expectations. Whatever the exact mechanics, the essential point survives: someone in the ancient world thought flatulence was funny enough to write down.

That matters. Writing was not exactly cheap entertainment in Sumer. You could not just whip out your phone and post, “LOL bride farted” to the Mesopotamian group chat. Someone had to press symbols into clay. Someone had to preserve the record. Someone, somewhere, decided this was worth immortalizing.

And nearly four millennia later, here we are, proving them correct.

The Medieval World Was Not as Serious as Its Portraits Suggest

When modern people imagine the Middle Ages, we tend to picture plague, castles, chain mail, monks, illuminated manuscripts, and people dying at the age of thirty-two while looking sixty-eight. We do not always picture professional farting.

This has made history classes far duller than they deserve to be.

Medieval life certainly had plenty of hardship, but it also had jokes, songs, festivals, feasts, performers, fools, and a robust appreciation for bodily humor. Court entertainment was not limited to harps and people reciting poetry until the king quietly wondered whether war might be preferable. Medieval courts employed jesters, minstrels, acrobats, dancers, animal trainers, and comic performers whose job was to amuse powerful people who could otherwise spend their time invading France. Again.

In that world, a flatulist who could produce a precisely timed fart was not a nuisance. He was a talent.

Which brings us to one of history’s most magnificently titled individuals: Roland the Farter.

Roland the Farter: The Man, the Myth, the Annual Christmas Obligation

Roland the Farter lived in twelfth-century England and is associated with the court of King Henry II. His name appears in medieval records in several forms, including Roland le Fartere and Roland le Petour. The specific details of his life are foggy, because medieval recordkeeping was not designed to satisfy future bloggers asking, “But exactly how many acres did the fart guy get?”

Still, the basic story is astonishing enough without embellishment.

Roland reportedly held land at Hemingstone in Suffolk by serjeanty, a form of land tenure in which the tenant owed a particular service to the king. Some people owed military service. Some owed ceremonial duties. Some provided equipment, supplies, or labor. In the case of the Foulis estate in Scotland, the land is held on the condition that the owner has to provide the sovereign with a snowball upon request.

Roland owed a performance.

According to the famous summary of his obligation, he was required to perform before the king’s court at Christmas: one jump, one whistle, and one fart.

Simultaneously.

Let us pause here, not because we have lost our place, but because civilization demands a moment of silent respect. This was not a casual contribution to a holiday party. This was a legally significant annual duty tied to landholding. Somewhere in the machinery of medieval English government was a man whose property rights were connected to the successful execution of a synchronized leap, whistle, and controlled rearward trumpet blast.

The Magna Carta gets all the attention, but this is the kind of thing that really makes English legal history sing.

We do not know exactly what Roland’s broader act looked like. Surely he did more than walk in cold and perform the three-part maneuver. Even the best punchline needs a setup. Perhaps he had jokes. Perhaps he danced. Perhaps he mocked local nobles, which would have been risky but probably satisfying. Perhaps the court knew exactly what was coming and still laughed every year, because repetition is the mother of tradition and also most office birthday parties.

What we do know is that Roland’s famous act survived in the record because it was attached to land tenure. This makes him one of the few entertainers in history whose act can be discussed with scholarly aplomb by both medievalists and property lawyers.

The Fine Print, Because History Likes to Ruin a Good Story

Before we crown Roland patron saint of synchronized flatulence, a warning is in order: the details get slippery.

Different accounts vary on how much land Roland held. Some say thirty acres. Some retellings inflate the holding or blur the timeline. Later writers loved the story, and repeated it with the enthusiasm of people who had discovered that medieval records sometimes contain the word “fart.”

That does not mean Roland was invented from scratch. It means the responsible historian must say something like: “The medieval record points to a performer named Roland whose tenure involved a comic flatulence performance, but later retellings may have added seasoning.”

There. We have been responsible.

Now we may return to the farting.

Japan Enters the Conversation With Fart Battles

Flatulence humor was not merely a European specialty, and it certainly was not limited to royal courts. In Japan, artists created humorous scrolls and prints depicting what are often called he-gassen, or “fart battles.”

These images show people weaponizing flatulence against one another in exaggerated combat scenes. Farts burst across rooms. Clothing flies. Opponents reel from invisible blasts. It is exactly the kind of art historians must describe with scholarly caution while everyone else says, “That guy just knocked over a wall with air from his butt.”

Some interpretations suggest these images may have carried social or political satire, including anxieties about foreigners, changing customs, or social disorder. They may also have served the simpler and more timeless purpose of making people laugh at weaponized rear-end artillery.

Both explanations can be true. Great art often works on multiple levels. Sometimes those levels include visual metaphor, political commentary, and a man defeating his enemies with gastrointestinal thunder.

See “He-Gassen: The Japanese Fart Battle Scroll That Turned Gas Into Fine Art” for more insight into this surprisingly serious subject.

Enter Le Pétomane, the Moulin Rouge’s Most Unusual Virtuoso

If Roland the Farter was the medieval pioneer, Joseph Pujol was the grand master.

Pujol was born in Marseille in 1857. He eventually became famous under the stage name Le Pétomane, which roughly translates as “the fart maniac” or “fartomaniac.” It sounds less like a performer and more like that guy who always sat by himself in the lunchroom and didn’t have a lot of friends. Or, perhaps, a villain rejected from a very strange Batman episode. In late nineteenth-century France, however, he became a box-office attraction.

His origin story is one of the more peculiar tales in entertainment history. As the story goes, young Pujol discovered his unusual ability while swimming. He realized that he could draw water into his rectum and expel it again. Most people experiencing this would immediately seek medical advice and spend the rest of their lives avoiding beaches. Pujol apparently thought, “Interesting. I wonder if this scales.”

It did.

He learned that he could also draw in air and release it under muscular control. This distinction is important. Le Pétomane’s act was not ordinary digestive flatulence. He was not simply eating beans backstage and hoping for the best. He was taking in external air and expelling it. That is why accounts of his act often stress that it was odorless.

It was, in other words, less “intestinal emergency” and more “tragically misplaced wind instrument.”

You can listen to an audio recording of one of his performances here. It is in French, but as it turns out, a French fart loses surprisingly little in translation. We refer to the sound, of course. The word for “fart” is embarrassingly similar to another French word, as the Duke of Windsor discovered when attempting to praise a paix formidable — a “formidable peace” — and instead producing a pet formidable — a “formidable fart.” We previously explored that linguistic hazard in “Which Is More Formidable?”

The Artistry of the Rearward Ocarina

Pujol did not merely make noises. That would be amateur hour, and Le Pétomane was no amateur. He developed an act.

He could produce impressions, sound effects, and musical notes. He reportedly imitated animals, cannon fire, and recognizable tunes. In one of the most famous descriptions of his performance, he attached a rubber tube to an ocarina and played music in a manner that probably caused every legitimate ocarina player in Europe to quietly reconsider the profession.

Audiences loved him.

And not just rowdy tavern audiences, either. Le Pétomane became a sensation at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the famous cabaret that opened in 1889 and became synonymous with spectacle, glamour, and people making questionable decisions under excellent lighting. The Moulin Rouge had dancers, music, costumes, novelty acts, celebrities, and one man whose posterior apparently had better stage presence than most politicians.

This was Belle Époque Paris: electric lights, posters, can-can dancers, artists, aristocrats, bohemians, absinthe, and Le Pétomane walking onto the stage to demonstrate that culture is a many-splendored thing.

His act was astonishingly popular. People came to hear him perform. They laughed. They cheered. Some accounts say the laughter was so intense that audience members fainted, especially in an era when tight corsets already made breathing a competitive event. One man apparently had a heart attack while laughing. Le Pétomane capitalized upon this free publicity and posted warnings to patrons, advising them that the performance could be dangerous to those with delicate conditions. He even placed nurses in noticeable positions throughout the theater to offer medical assistance if needed.

Whether every dramatic story is strictly verifiable or not, the broad truth is clear: Le Pétomane was a star.

The Highest-Paid Man in the Room, Which Raises Questions About the Room

Many accounts describe Le Pétomane as one of the highest-paid entertainers in France at the peak of his fame. The commonly repeated figure is astonishing: as much as 20,000 francs a week. Some versions of the story phrase it as 20,000 francs per show or suggest that his act brought in that amount at the box office, so we should keep one hand on the emergency brake before driving the claim straight into the Hall of Historical Certainty.

Still, even the cautious version is enough to make one’s accountant sit down and stare quietly into the middle distance. The old French franc was tied to gold, and using that gold value as a rough comparison, 20,000 francs would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $845,000 today. That is not a perfect inflation calculation, because historical currency conversions are where confidence goes to be gnawed by economists. But as a ballpark figure, it gives us some sense of the scale.

In other words, Le Pétomane may have been earning the modern equivalent of serious celebrity money for an act that involved formalwear, stagecraft, muscular control, and a musical instrument being approached from a direction no conservatory ever recommended.

This is one of those moments when people like to insist that entertainment used to be more refined. Then we look closer and discover that refined audiences in Belle Époque Paris were lining up to hear a man play tunes with pressurized air from the least expected section of the orchestra pit. The past was not more dignified. It merely wore better hats.

Contract Law, But Make It Windy

Le Pétomane’s relationship with the Moulin Rouge eventually soured. Accounts describe a dispute after he performed outside the theater, allegedly violating his exclusive arrangement. The theater sued, he left, and he eventually opened his own venue.

There are many legal phrases that sound impressive in a courtroom: breach of contract, injunctive relief, specific performance, damages, exclusivity clause.

Then there is the phrase “unauthorized public fart serenade,” which we are not certain appears in any pleading, but should.

The dispute makes a bizarre kind of sense. Le Pétomane’s act was not merely a joke. It was valuable intellectual property, or at least valuable show business property. The Moulin Rouge had promoted him, audiences paid to see him, and his performance had become part of the theater’s draw. If he took that act elsewhere, the business people noticed.

Even in the world of professional flatulence, commerce has a way of entering the room and ruining the mood.

The Copycat Problem, or Milli Vanilli With More Bellows

After Le Pétomane’s departure, some accounts say the Moulin Rouge tried to replace him with a female performer whose act copied his. The problem, allegedly, was that her performance was not genuine. Hidden beneath her costume was a bellows or similar device used to simulate the effect.

This is the sort of scandal that reminds us every artistic field has its frauds. Opera has had lip-syncing controversies. Pop music had Milli Vanilli, whose Grammy-winning career collapsed when the world learned that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan had not actually sung on their hit records. The world of professional flatulence had a woman in petticoats allegedly outsourcing the entire performance to concealed equipment.

It is hard not to admire the audacity. It is also hard not to imagine Le Pétomane reacting like a betrayed concert violinist who had just learned his rival was secretly playing a kazoo behind a curtain. This was not merely a performer copying his material. This was, if the story is true, the flatulist equivalent of lip-syncing: all stage presence, no authentic wind.

Art has standards. Even this art. Especially this art, perhaps, because when your entire career depends on the audience believing the sound is coming from where you say it is coming from, authenticity is not a luxury. It is the whole show.

World War I and the End of an Era

Le Pétomane’s career did not end because audiences suddenly became too sophisticated. That was never likely. Humanity had been laughing at this sort of thing since Sumer, and there was no reason to think Paris would suddenly say, “No, thank you, we are all about string quartets and moral uplift now.”

What changed was the world.

When World War I began in 1914, Europe was plunged into a catastrophe that made old cabaret absurdities feel like relics from another universe. The war brought mechanized slaughter, mass grief, and cultural trauma on a scale that altered nearly everything. The same audiences that once laughed at Le Pétomane’s simulated cannon fire now lived in a world where real artillery had made the joke substantially less charming.

There is a grim little irony here. We have previously explored the story of history’s deadliest fart: the account from Flavius Josephus of a Roman soldier whose obscene gesture and flatulent insult at the Temple in Jerusalem helped spark a deadly riot during Passover, resulting in thousands of deaths. So, according to one corner of the historical record, a fart once helped start a deadly conflict. In Le Pétomane’s case, however, it was a deadly conflict that helped bring professional farting as mainstream entertainment to an end.

History, as usual, has no respect for tonal consistency.

Pujol retired from the stage and returned to business life, including baking and related ventures. There is something almost poetic about that arc: from baker to performer to baker again. He began with bread, rose to fame through wind, and returned to bread. Somewhere, a metaphor is trying to happen, but we will not force it. We have standards, despite mounting evidence.

Joseph Pujol died in 1945, leaving behind one of the strangest careers in entertainment history—and proof that even the most ridiculous art form can be silenced by a world that has suddenly become far too serious.

Was It Really Farting?

This is where the science enters, wearing a lab coat and regretting its assignment.

Ordinary flatulence comes from a combination of swallowed air and gases produced during digestion, especially by bacteria in the intestines. That is why food, digestion, gut bacteria, and medical conditions can affect the amount, sound, and odor of gas. Normal human beings pass gas regularly. It is not a moral failure. It is biology’s least elegant reminder that the body is a committee, and several members are bacteria.

Le Pétomane’s act was different. His skill was described as the ability to draw air into the rectum and expel it at will. Since the air was not produced by digestion, it did not carry the usual odor. That helped make his act stage-friendly, or at least as stage-friendly as the concept could possibly be.

It also allowed him to blow out candles without fear of his act becoming a demonstration of a human flamethrower.

This means that professional flatulists such as Le Pétomane and his modern successors occupy a weird boundary between body comedy, muscular control, novelty music, and circus skill. They were not simply people with poor manners. They were trained performers using unusual anatomical control.

That sentence was not on our bingo card either.

Mr. Methane and the Modern Age of Controlled Anal Voicing

If you assumed professional flatulism died with Le Pétomane, please remember that humanity never abandons an absurd idea merely because it has already peaked. Somewhere, someone will always put on Lycra and ask, “What if we brought this back?”

The modern heir to this tradition is Mr. Methane, the stage name of British performer Paul Oldfield. He began performing professionally in the early 1990s and became known for delivering flatulent musical performances on cue, including appearances on television and talent shows. Guinness World Records recognizes him for the longest career as a male flatulist.

Mr. Methane’s act follows the same basic principle associated with Le Pétomane: taking in air and expelling it under control. He has described the skill as “controlled anal voicing,” a phrase that sounds like it should be in a medical journal, a drama school prospectus, or a sealed envelope marked “Do Not Open During Lunch.”

His existence proves two things.

First, there really is a historical lineage of professional flatulists stretching from medieval courts to modern stages.

Second, no matter how advanced technology becomes, someone will find a way to use it to amplify a fart.

Why Do We Laugh?

The obvious answer is: because farts are funny.

This is not sophisticated, but it is honest. Flatulence is one of the simplest forms of comedy because it combines surprise, sound, embarrassment, and bodily reality. It violates decorum without usually doing real harm. It is naughty enough to provoke laughter but universal enough to avoid true alienation.

Everyone has a body. Everyone’s body occasionally betrays them. Fart humor works because it collapses social rank. A king may wear ermine. A bishop may carry a crozier. A professor may have footnotes long enough to qualify as municipal infrastructure. But everyone answers to digestion.

This is why Roland the Farter’s story is so perfect. He performed before royalty, but his act reminded everyone in the hall that beneath the titles, swords, gowns, and courtly manners, they were all human beings occupying fragile biological machinery.

Le Pétomane did something similar in the cabaret world. Parisian audiences arrived expecting entertainment, sophistication, and novelty. They got all three, delivered through an anatomical loophole.

It is tempting to dismiss all of this as low comedy, and in one sense, it absolutely is. It does not get much lower. But low comedy often reveals things high culture tries to hide. It reminds us that dignity is temporary, bodies are unruly, and laughter is one of the few things that can make embarrassment communal instead of solitary.

In other words: fart jokes endure because humanity endures, and humanity is leaky.

The Professionalization of the Ridiculous

There is another reason this history is so fascinating. Professional flatulists show us that almost anything can become performance if someone has sufficient skill, timing, confidence, and disregard for career-day expectations.

Roland’s act was not merely a bodily accident. It was a required performance. Le Pétomane did not stumble into fame by embarrassing himself at dinner. He practiced. He developed material. He structured an act. He worked audiences. He understood showmanship. Mr. Methane did not become a record-holding performer by accident. He built a persona, took the stage, and committed fully to the premise.

That is the difference between embarrassment and entertainment. One person makes an awkward noise and blames the chair. Another person charges admission.

Show business has always rewarded novelty. Singers sing. Dancers dance. Magicians make things disappear. Jugglers juggle. Acrobats defy gravity. Flatulists remind us that gravity is not the only force with which humanity has made an uneasy peace.

History Refuses to Behave

The story of professional farting is ridiculous, but it is not meaningless. It connects ancient jokes, medieval courts, Japanese art, Parisian cabaret, medical curiosity, contract disputes, celebrity culture, and modern record-setting performance. That is a lot of historical mileage from one bodily function.

It also reminds us that the past was populated by actual people, not oil paintings with pulse rates. They laughed at things they were not supposed to laugh at. They paid to see strange acts. They told crude jokes. They made legal arrangements around absurd customs. They turned bodily awkwardness into art.

In that sense, Roland the Farter and Le Pétomane are not just historical oddities. They are ambassadors from the Kingdom of Human Nonsense, a realm with permanent diplomatic relations everywhere.

We can pretend to be above them, but we are not. We are the same species that preserved a Sumerian fart joke for nearly four thousand years. We are the same species that built the Moulin Rouge and then made one of its most famous early attractions a man who could play tunes with pressurized air from the least expected section of the orchestra.

History is full of kings, battles, inventions, treaties, revolutions, and discoveries. It is also full of people laughing at farts.

And honestly, that may be one of the most historically consistent things about us.

Professional Farters: The Wind Beneath History’s Wings

So let us give the professional flatulists their due.

Roland the Farter turned medieval land tenure into the world’s strangest Christmas performance review. Le Pétomane conquered Paris with a tuxedo, stagecraft, and anatomical control that no school guidance counselor has ever recommended. Japanese artists imagined flatulence as battlefield technology. Mr. Methane carried the torch into the modern era, presumably after checking wind direction.

They remind us that human culture is not built only from solemn achievements. It is also built from jokes, embarrassment, spectacle, novelty, and the ancient realization that a sudden rude noise can reduce even the most dignified room to helpless laughter.

We may build monuments, write epics, compose laws, and launch spacecraft. But somewhere in the background, someone will always be laughing at a fart.

And if that seems beneath us, history would like a word.

Preferably from a safe distance.

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