Cultural history · sourced documentary
How the fart was privatised
The oldest recorded joke in human history, on a clay tablet from around 1900 BC, is about a fart. For more than three millennia afterwards, the sound stayed in public space: in diplomacy, in land law, in theatre, in theology. Then, over roughly two and a half centuries, it vanished from language. This page documents that journey, with etiquette manuals as the principal witness, and shows what actually changed. Not the body: the ear.
I · The artefact
On an Old Babylonian tablet sits the oldest recorded joke identified to date, a Sumerian proverb dated to around 1900 BC:
"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Sumerian proverb, c. 1900 BC, per the Dave Historical Humour Study, Univ. of Wolverhampton, 2008
The dating comes from a study led by Paul McDonald at the University of Wolverhampton, commissioned, admittedly, by a TV channel. Critics noted at once that it is a proverb rather than a set-up-and-punchline joke, and the surviving tablets are copies of possibly older material. So we keep both the fact and its ceiling: the first recorded humour of our species is flatulent, and the joke only works because a norm to break already existed. Shame was not invented by modernity; modernity would only change its range.
II · The ancient world, out loud
In antiquity the fart is not merely tolerated: it is used. Four scenes, four registers of power.
Egypt570 BC
Herodotus (II.162): the general Amasis, summoned to heel by Pharaoh Apries's envoy, rises in the saddle, breaks wind and tells the messenger to carry it back to his master. Apries mutilates the messenger, Egypt sides with Amasis, the dynasty falls. The insult is public, therefore political; Amasis then reigns for four decades.
Herodot, Istorii II.162 · Perseus
Athens423 BC
In Aristophanes's Clouds, "Socrates" teaches Strepsiades that thunder is just the wind of colliding clouds, and the pupil instantly confirms it from his own physiology, after a bowl of soup. The gag runs a full scene, performed at the city's dramatic competition before thousands of citizens. Attic comedy treats flatulence as everyday equipment, not an unspeakable shame.
Aristofan, Norii, vv. 380–394 · Perseus
Romec. 41–54
Suetonius (Claudius, 32) records that the emperor, on hearing of a dinner guest who had endangered his health through polite restraint, "is even said to have considered an edict" permitting flatulence at table, on health grounds. An edict considered, on hearsay, not issued: the distinction matters and we return to it below, under verification. In the same world, Josephus describes how a Roman soldier's obscene gesture towards the Passover crowd in Jerusalem, around AD 50, triggers a stampede that kills thousands.
Suetoniu, Claudius 32 · LacusCurtius | Iosephus, BJ II
Hippo426
Even the father of Christian shame records the feat: in The City of God (XIV.24), Augustine describes people with such command of the body that they "appear to sing from that region", with no odour at all. For him this is theological evidence: before the Fall, the body obeyed the will entirely. The controlled fart, as a memory of paradise.
Augustin, De civitate Dei XIV.24 · New Advent
III · The Middle Ages
In twelfth-century England, flatulence enters land law. The Liber Feodorum, the crown's fiscal register, records the serjeanty of Rollandus le Pettour, Roland the Farter: he held Hemingstone manor in Suffolk, put by sources at anywhere from 30 to 110 acres, on condition that every Christmas Day he perform before the king, all at once,
„unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum”
one jump, one whistle and one fart · Liber Feodorum, 1920 ed., p. 386
His link to Henry II is attested from 1159; the manor then passes to his son and grandchildren, obligation included, until it is alienated. This is not urban legend, it is land registry. And for the scale of the reward: a prosperous householder of the day held roughly the same acreage by working all year, not three seconds every 25 December.
Two centuries later, Chaucer builds the climax of The Miller's Tale on a fart "as great as it had been a thunder-dent" (l. 3806), and in The Summoner's Tale divides one, via an engineering problem, among twelve friars. The high literature of medieval England laughs wholeheartedly; nobody feels the need to apologise. The medievalist Valerie Allen, author of the only academic monograph on the subject, describes the medieval fart as public language with legal, comic and theological weight all at once.
IV · Other worlds, other rules
Three cultures, three positions of the same line: shame with a long memory, art with a box office, theology with a sphincter.
The Arab world1001 Nights
In the tale collected by Richard Burton, "How Abu Hasan Brake Wind", a merchant lets out a resounding one at his own wedding, flees in shame as far as India and returns only after ten years, incognito. Under the window of his old house he hears a mother dating her daughter's birth: "on the night Abu Hasan farted". He leaves for good. Shame here does not mean an absence of humour: it means social memory with its own calendar.
Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol. 5
JapanEdo · 1680–1846
In the very decade Paris falls silent, Edo applauds. In the early 1770s the polymath Hiraga Gennai writes Hōhiron, "On Farting", a satirical eulogy of a real performer in Ryōgoku who played tunes and impressions on his "rear-end flute"; Gennai holds him up as a model of originality against an ossified official culture. And the he-gassen scroll, the "fart battle", digitised by Waseda University (an 1846 copy of a 1680 original attributed to Hishikawa Moronobu), unrolls ten metres of satire in which people, cats and dignitaries are blown off their feet.
Gennai, trad. Sibley (1998) · Waseda Univ. Library
Innu, Quebec and Labrador20th-c. ethnography
Among the Innu, the fart has theological standing. The anthropologist Peter Armitage documents the spirit Matshishkapeu, literally "Fart Man", whom hunters call mishta-utshimau, the big boss: more powerful than the Caribou Master, whom in myth he punishes with constipation until he relents and releases game to the people. His utterances, that is, the farts, are cryptic and get interpreted in camp. The organ of European shame is, here, an organ of revelation.
Armitage, Religiologiques 6 (1992), PDF
The correct reading⚖
Not that "everyone outside Europe laughed freely". Abu Hasan shows a shame harsher than any Parisian salon, with no absolutist court to produce it. The tour proves something else: the threshold is a local institution with its own mechanics, not a constant of human nature. Whoever wants to explain the European variant must therefore explain a change, not an essence. Enter Elias.
frame: Elias (1939); contra: Duerr (1988–2002)
V · The hinge: 1530–1774
Norbert Elias read Europe's etiquette manuals like a seismograph: the same gesture, described decades apart, shows the threshold of shame migrating. On flatulence the series is clean. In 1530 the subject is regulated but speakable, in a manual for children. In 1729 it is forbidden but still described in detail. In the 1774 edition of the same manual, the chapters on bodily functions shrivel: the rule becomes "one does not speak of this". And by 1892, what can no longer be said can, at last, be sold. Press the years.
"Some teach that boys should keep in the gas of their bellies by compressing their buttocks. But it is not civil to become ill while trying to seem polite. If you can withdraw, do it alone; if not, follow the ancient proverb: hide the fart with a cough."
Europe's most-read humanist writes this in a handbook for an 11-year-old. Health beats etiquette, and the subject is taught serenely, in Latin, in broad daylight. Regulated, not unspeakable.
"It is very impolite to emit wind from your body when in company, whether from above or below, even if it is done without noise."
The ban becomes total: not even without noise. But note the transitional paradox: to forbid in detail, you must still name in detail. The subject is outlawed, yet remains perfectly describable in a schoolbook.
"It is very impolite to emit wind from your body când te afli în companie, fie de sus, fie de jos, chiar dacă o faci fără zgomot.”
A visual reconstruction, not a quotation: in the 1774 edition the chapters on bodily functions are drastically cut, and the surviving rule is that these things are no longer spoken of at all. Elias documents the pattern on the same pages: the chapter on spitting, four pages in 1729, shrinks to one. His observation: what disappears from the manuals no longer needs teaching, because it has become "second nature". The external constraint has moved inside.
LE PÉTOMANE
"The only artist who pays no author's royalties"
takings: up to 20,000 gold francs a day · Sarah Bernhardt: 8,000
Joseph Pujol plays "Au clair de la lune" from the seat of his satin breeches, and Paris pays. The ban is proven by the very success: transgression only sells where the norm is total. The audience's grandparents would not have understood what there was to buy.
VI · The mechanism
Norbert Elias published The Civilizing Process in 1939, in Basel, in exile, in the worst possible year for a book about how Europe grew more restrained. It was ignored for three decades and rediscovered after the 1970s translations as one of sociology's grand theories. The thesis couples two processes. Sociogenesis: as the absolutist state monopolises violence, the warrior noble becomes a courtier, and competition moves from the battlefield to the salon, where the weapon is conduct. Psychogenesis: the external constraint, enforced by the court's gaze, is internalised generation by generation until it becomes automatic shame, felt as nature.
For flatulence, this explains the manual series precisely: bodily control works as a distinction technology. It is free, visible and hard to fake over time, ideal for an aristocracy no longer allowed to duel. The bourgeoisie imitates court etiquette; the court, to stay distinct, raises the threshold; and once the norm becomes general, its class origin is forgotten. What no longer needs teaching vanishes from the manuals. Which is why the silence of the 1774 edition is not a gap in the archive: it is the phenomenon itself, caught in the act.
Status competition in a pacified space: the governed body becomes social capital. Nothing changes about the gas; what changes is the social price of the sound.
Norms migrate down the social ladder and inward, into the psyche; internalised subjects exit discourse. Exactly the 1530 → 1729 → 1774 pattern.
Elias's evidence is manuals, prescriptive discourse rather than measured behaviour; the corpus is mostly French and German; and the 1530–1774 window dates the elite's silence, not the village's, where the subject stayed spoken long after.
Hans Peter Duerr, in five volumes pointedly titled The Myth of the Civilizing Process (1988–2002), assembles ethnographic counterexamples: bodily shame is near-universal, so it cannot be a product of the European court. Elias's defenders (Stephen Mennell among them) reply that the theory never claims shame was invented, only that its structure, range and enforcer changed. Abu Hasan, from section IV, is compatible with both readings. The dispute remains open in the literature.
VII · The ricochet
Once the norm is total, two symmetrical industries grow around it: one sells the transgression, the other sells the discretion. The twentieth century patents both.
Torontoc. 1930
Employees at the JEM Rubber Co. improvise the whoopee cushion from rubber offcuts. America's prank king, Sam Adams, declines to distribute it as "too vulgar"; the Johnson Smith catalogue sells it by the million. The forbidden sound returns to market as a simulacrum: a fart you can buy precisely because you are no longer allowed to produce one.
company lore, widely repeated in the press; details vary
Japan1988
Toto launches the "Sound Princess", a device that plays flushing noise in public toilets. The reason is accountancy: women were flushing repeatedly just to cover the sounds, wasting litres per visit. Elias's threshold, sunk so deep it has its own button: shame, measured in cubic metres of water and solved by engineering.
Toto, convergent press accounts
USPTO2017
The United States grants patent "Bodily Function Sound Anonymization": a system that detects and acoustically masks bodily sounds in the bathroom so that flatmates cannot attribute them. The document, candidly filed under "amusement devices", is the terminus of the journey: what was public language in Herodotus becomes a signal to be anonymised, with intellectual property rights attached.
USPTO 9,538,304 · 3 Jan 2017
Internet1892 → 2015
Joseph Pujol filled the Moulin Rouge because the forbidden sound was a payable rarity. His declared heir, Britain's Paul Oldfield, Mr. Methane, the world's only working professional flatulist, caught the era in which rarity died: Atlas Obscura documented in 2015 how the internet, saturating the world with precisely this content, made the profession unviable. Transgression sold only while the norm was total and supply was scarce. The public market for the sound closed a second time, this time through abundance.
McRobbie, Atlas Obscura, 2015
VIII · Verification
The subject attracts exaggeration like a magnet. The page's main claims, graded.
| Claim | Status | Verification note |
|---|---|---|
| The oldest recorded joke is about a fart (c. 1900 BC) | solid, with a ceiling | A single study (McDonald, Univ. of Wolverhampton, 2008), commissioned by the TV channel Dave; adopted by Guinness. It is a proverb rather than a punchline joke, and the tablets may copy older material. The basic fact, a flatulent Sumerian text from the early second millennium BC, is not contested. |
| Roland held a manor for jump + whistle + fart | confirmed | Recorded in the Liber Feodorum (1920 ed., p. 386), the crown's fiscal register, with the full Latin formula and the alienation history. The exact acreage varies between sources, from 30 to 110 acres; the tenure itself is documentation, not legend. |
| Claudius issued an edict permitting flatulence at table | legend, as stated | Suetonius writes dicitur etiam meditatus edictum: he "is said to have considered" an edict. A rumour about an intention, reported 70 years after the emperor's death by an author fond of anecdotes. No edict is attested. |
| The 1530–1774 window in which the subject exits discourse | solid, as interpretation | The window's endpoints are real documents (Erasmus 1530; the La Salle editions of 1729 and 1774). Reading them as a series within a single process is Elias's, and Duerr contests it. It dates elite prescriptive discourse, not general behaviour. |
| Le Pétomane took 20,000 francs a day, double Sarah Bernhardt | unverified | The figures circulate from the Nohain & Caradec biography (1967), written decades after the fact, and are repeated with no box-office source. The enormous Moulin Rouge success is well attested; the precise accounting is not. |
The tablet of 1900 BC and the patent of 2017 bracket the same constant: the fart was never just gas, it was always a boundary. Elias says Europe moved the fence; Duerr says the fence was always there. Neither disputes what the archive shows: that between Erasmus and the 1774 edition, a subject taught to children in Latin became unspeakable, and we have been paying ever since, in rubber pranks, in toilet water and in patent fees, to administer the silence.
Documentary · June 2026
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