Commentary, witticisms, and the random musings of a doofus

Jeff Brown and I used to eat at The Sahara Dinner Buffet where I had, to this day, the best spectacle of bowel-wrenching flatulence of my life. The room was full of mostly elderly people, tables tightly packed, and we were seated dead center. It was silent except for the slight tinkling of silverware on plates. I felt my lower intestine chamber-up and I knew that this had championship prospects, and I knew Jeff Brown would have absolutely no appreciation for what was about to happen, which made it way funnier. My chair was the perfect hard plastic for maximum reverberation. I was choking down the belly-laugh as I leaned up and into the table, hands on the corners, thoroughly telegraphing my intentions. What came out of me was ‘Hell’s trumpet’.

A deafening tear echoed off of every corner of that muted hall—it lasted at least six to seven seconds, a veritable eternity of hang-time for non-stop wind. The pitch roared up and down the scales in range. The clarity of sound would have made you feel like you were actually dining inside my colon! People were seated literally a foot behind me. When it concluded, all sound in the dining room had completely evaporated; there was no question that every single person of the hundred or so that were in there had bore witness to my masterpiece! Jeff Brown was paralyzed with inner fury as the mortified silence turned to widespread murmurs of disgust. I simply stared at my plate as tears flooded my eyes, my nose ran, and I began to drool while convulsing and desperately trying to contain any audible laugh. Jeff would have run out the door had it not been situated so far away. He was genuinely enraged and still comically fumes to this day when I bring that story up.

I laughed when I wrote this, I laughed at every re-write of this, and I’m laughing while I telling this story. Farts are the funniest thing in life, and if you disagree then you have no soul—end of story.

— Doug Stanhope, Digging Up Mother: A Love Story (Audio version, Audible Studios, 2016) at 15:27.