the biggest fart in history
My junior year high school math class was right after lunch. My two best friends were in the same class.
Mrs. J (name removed for privacy) was around 6 months pregnant. She was a little round lady and we loved her. One day she was walking near my desk and let one squeak out. I claimed it and got a good laugh. That was all the encouragement I needed.
Over the next several weeks I stopped holding them in and so did my two friends. It went from kind of funny to really off-putting to extremely funny. There were at least a small handful of people who sat in the opposite corner who also thought it was funny.
The ideal was a loud one that didn’t smell. But there were some regrettable nose-hair burners. Mrs. J made us sit in the corner closest to the door, with the door propped open. This bit probably lasted for a solid 2 months.
For the most part people got used to it and pretended like it wasn’t happening. I had to raise the stakes. One day I brought cabbage and beans to lunch, with plenty to share.
That day I let one rip that felt like a shockwave through my body. It bounced off the walls. Somebody in the hallway started laughing. The class laughed for a good minute. The rest weren’t as funny after that and we retired the bit.
It’s funny to think that someone somewhere has let out the biggest fart in human history. I hope there was an audience around to appreciate it. What do you imagine when you try to picture that? It could have been an ice age hunter farting and scaring away a mammoth; a fat dude in a straw hut waking the village at 5am.
They wouldn’t have known the full scope of their achievement, but they had to have known that they were in the running. Maybe they died in the process: a sacrifice to the comedy gods.