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21 facts about farts: from Hitler's wind to the flatulent Roman who caused 10,000 deaths
From Hitler’s chronic flatulence to a minister’s wind-induced exile, Jonny Wilkes looks at how farts have shaped politics, culture and society across 4,000 years of history
- Jonny Wilkes
Published: June 28, 2026 at 4:00 PM
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1. The world’s oldest joke is about a fart
In the clearest proof that toilet humour has always been funny, the oldest-known documented joke in human history is flatulence-based. From 1900 BC, the Sumerians from what is now southern Iraq came up with this proverb: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Admittedly, it is not a laugh-out-loud side-splitter; thank goodness that fart jokes are much more sophisticated these days.
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2. A fart signalled the start of an ancient rebellion
According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, a fart once rang out in antiquity that gave new meaning to the word ‘revolting’. Around 570 BC, an unpopular Egyptian pharaoh, Apries, was in danger of being overthrown by his own troops, so he sent one of his top generals, Amasis, to restore order.
Instead, the would-be rebels declared Amasis as their new ruler, which he seemed happy to accept. When Apries sent a messenger seeking an update, Amasis let one rip as a response to be taken back to the pharaoh. Soon, a revolt broke out and Apries was killed by an angry mob. The farting general sat on the throne for more than four decades.
3. Adolf Hitler’s chronic flatulence resulted in a drug addiction
The Nazi leader hardly fitted the Aryan ideal he espoused: he would not be described as a tall, blond Adonis in peak physical shape, would he? In fact, he suffered for years with chronic stomach cramps, constipation and uncontrollable flatulence. It made his dinner parties awkward and malodourous affairs.
In 1936, the farting Führer turned to a doctor named Theodor Morell, who prescribed anti-gas medication containing poisonous strychnine. Hitler soon became reliant on these pills, and thanks to Morell’s treatments, he got addicted to a hazardous cocktail of drugs, including cocaine. There is every possibility that this caused his increasingly unstable mental state in his later years.
Adolf Hitler with his personal physician, Theodor Morell, 1944. The Führer’s reliance on anti-flatulence medication later developed into an addiction to various drugs – including cocaine | Credit: Getty Images
4. A Roman emperor considered a free-farting edict
Like sneezing and blowing the nose, flatulence is a natural thing and a sign of a healthy digestive system. It’s holding them in that can cause problems, and that thought worried the Roman emperor Claudius.
Best known for launching the conquest of Britain in AD 43, he considered passing an edict to encourage dinner guests to break wind freely. This was claimed, at least, by Roman historian Suetonius, who may have been making a joke. Suetonius also started the rumour that Caligula tried to make his horse a consul.
5. Henry II’s Christmas entertainment was given by Roland the Farter
Of all the talents and tricks that a jester could have used to entertain the court of Henry II of England (r1154-89), guess which one Roland the Farter specialised in. Every Christmas, he performed a popular routine described in Latin as unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum, which translates as ‘one jump and one whistle and one fart’. While one has to speculate exactly what this would have looked like, the king clearly enjoyed it since Roland received the lavish compensation of a manor house in Suffolk.
- Read more | What was life like for a court jester?
6. Le Pétomane could fart the French national anthem
There have been several flatulence-based entertainers – or flatulists – in history, but few as famous as Joseph Pujol. Better known as Le Pétomane, the French ‘fartiste’ had machine-like control over his moneymaker as he sucked in air and could expel it again in powerful, symphonic gusts. He could parp out the French national anthem and impersonate thunder and cannon fire or smoke a cigarette and blow out the stage lights – all by (ahem) working his arse off.
At the end of the 19th century, he became the biggest draw at Paris’s Moulin Rouge and caught the attention of the great American inventor Thomas Edison, who was working on how to add smell to film. While his version of Smell-O-Vision did not go anywhere, a short clip of a performing Le Pétomane still survives, although tragically without sound.
An 1893 illustration shows Le Pétomane at work. One of the most famous flatulists in history, Pujol was a likely contender to star in Smell-O-Vision, if the medium had ever come to fruition | Credit: Getty Images
7. Literature is littered with flatulence
Some of the most respected names in the history of literature were far from averse to toilet humour. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is bursting with bawdiness, including, in The Miller’s Tale, a scene where a man sticks his rear end out of a window and lets rip in another man’s face.
Alongside Aladdin and Ali Baba, One Thousand and One Nights includes Abu Hasan, whose tale involves fleeing the country after breaking wind at a wedding. And of course, the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, peppered many of his plays with not-so-subtle references to flatulence, from a suggestive “wind instrument” in Othello to Harry Hotspur’s insult in Henry IV, Part 1 that Owen Glendower had been born when the Earth farted.
8. A farting Roman caused 10,000 deaths
With Judea under the control of the Roman empire in the first century AD, Jewish people had to commemorate the festival of Passover at the Temple of Jerusalem under the watchful gaze of an army garrison. Tensions boiled over one year when a soldier, wishing to make his disdain for the Jews known, turned around, bent over and, wrote the historian Josephus, “spoke such words as you might expect at such a posture”.
The crowd was deeply insulted to be ‘spoken to’ in such a manner and a riot threatened to break out, leading the Romans to call in reinforcements. In the ensuing clash, Josephus claimed that as many as 10,000 died, mostly trampled trying to escape the temple.
9. Japanese artists filled scrolls with farting competitions
As already mentioned, flatulence has inspired jokes ever since, well, the beginning of jokes. The humour does not just take the form of crude word play, though. Japanese scrolls from the Edo period (1603-1868) and earlier depict farting competitions.
In one example of these He-Gassen from 1846, naked participants let out such violent bolts of wind from their rear ends that they blow over people, cats and trees, and even destroy houses. Despite the detail of He-Gassen, there is no evidence of farting contests actually taking place in Edo Japan.
Despite no evidence being found of real-life farting contests in Edo Japan, they were popular features of the He-Gassen scrolls, such as this one from the 1860s | Credit: Getty Images
10. A Founding Father called for a scientific cure for smelly farts
As well as one of the most important statesmen in US history, Benjamin Franklin made numerous advances as a scientist and inventor. There was something, however, he thought the scientific community needed to prioritise, according to a letter in 1781.
The Founding Father wanted a new substance that could be added to food and “render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes”. In truth, he wasn’t entirely serious: he intended the letter as a gentle dig against what he regarded as pretentious scientific societies.
Still, as ambassador to France at the time and with the fledgling United States fighting for its existence against the British, he really should have had more pressing matters than the smell of his farts.
11. Flatulence changed a Greek philosopher’s outlook on life – twice
While making a speech one day, the ancient Greek philosopher Metrocles accidentally let out an audible fart, which, understandably, rather dented the integrity of his words. Such was his embarrassment that he gave up on life and attempted to starve himself.
He was only saved when a fellow thinker, Crates of Thebes, visited him and let loose a fart of his own, and so demonstrated how shame was only the result of social conventions. A reassured Metrocles embraced this brand of philosophy, Cynicism, and became one of its most committed proponents.
12. A fart in the House of Commons inspired a political poem
In 1607, a parliamentary debate had a surprising interruption when the House of Commons echoed with the unmistakable sound of a fart. The offending MP, Henry Ludlow, may have hoped that after the laughter died down, the incident would be forgotten, but news spread and inspired a poem.
The Censure of the Parliament Fart satirically guesses what the other MPs’ reactions may have been to Ludlow’s embarrassing contribution to the debate, including this gem of a couplet: “‘Thanke God,’ quoth Sir Edward Hungerford, / ‘That this Fart proved not a Turdd.
A 20th-century illustration depicts a parliamentary session in the early 1600s. A unlucky MPs flatulence was recorded for posterity, in the form a satirical poem | Credit: Getty Images
13. Passing wind in front of the queen forced a noble into exile
Breaking wind in parliament is one thing; doing so while stood before the monarch is quite another. Such was the reported fate of Edward de Vere. According to a biography written by 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey, the earl of Oxford let one go when he bowed for Elizabeth I (r1558-1603), and he was so ashamed that he left the country and travelled for seven years.
His hopes of returning once the incident had been forgotten were immediately dashed, however: when he next saw the queen, she reassured him with the words, “My lord, we had forgot the fart.
14. People kept farts in jars to ward off the Great Plague
For millennia, the leading theory for how illnesses spread was through miasma, or bad air. During the Black Death, it was thought a whiff of a horrible, noxious smell could result in a fatal bout of the disease. That’s why plague doctors wore masks with long beaked noses, so they could stuff the end with pleasant-smelling flowers and herbs.
As for everyone else, during the Great Plague of London in 1665-66 doctors recommended storing farts in a jar to ensure there was something pungent to sniff and so keep the miasma at bay. Of course, it could be argued that a fart jar guaranteed bad air was never far away.
A plague doctor’s outfit, featuring the familiar flower-stuffed beaked mask. For those without such protection, storing farts in jars to smell was a popular way to dispel miasma | Credit: Getty Images
15. Martin Luther fought the devil by breaking wind
Needless to say, Martin Luther – the German monk and theologian who sparked the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century – had a lot to say on the issue of religion. But amongst his attacks on corruption in the church, he advocated a rather unusual method of keeping oneself free from sin. “I resist the devil, and often it is with a fart that I chase him away,” he reportedly said.
Scatology (the study of excrement) actually formed a common feature in Luther’s writings, but why Satan would be scared off by flatulence is anyone’s guess.
- Read more | Why did Martin Luther condemn the “hordes of peasants” fighting the war he helped inspire?
16. A British politician calls for more farting
The long-serving British politician Charles James Fox clearly had his mind on something other than parliamentary business. In 1800, the future foreign secretary published An Essay Upon Wind, which broke down the different “species of farts” – from the “sonorous and full-toned” to the “soft fizzing” – and the foods and methods required to produce each kind.
Chiefly, he argued for flatulence to be more widely accepted. Rather than those who “cowardly close their ports against the mild zephyrs of nature”, he implored his readers to “fart away”.
17. A mythical beast had an explosive defence against predators
Medieval bestiaries are compendiums of delightfully bizarre and mythical creatures believed to be roaming in far-off lands. Take the Bonnacon, a bull-like animal thought to be somewhere in modern-day Macedonia.
With horns curving inwards, rendering them useless, the Bonnacon’s chief weapon was its backside, as it could spray explosive excrement over huge distances. Its farts were said to be so acidic that it burned the skin of anyone unlucky to be in its path. No wonder the medieval illustrations of the Bonnacon show the people approaching it in full armour or with a shield.
The Bonnacon, one of many mythical creatures that appear in medieval bestiaries, was said to have an explosive weapon – namely, acidic excrement | Credit: Getty Images
18. Jonathan Swift wrote about the benefits of farting
The Gulliver’s Travels author was one of the great satirists of his age, but he had some more frivolous fun with his writing too. In 1722, Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet titled The Benefit of Farting Explain’d, under the pseudonym “Don Fartinando Puff-indorst, Professor of Bumbast in the University of Crackow”.
After trying to define the essence of farts, he stresses the health implications of suppressing them. The main takeaway was that preventing wind coming out at one end would inevitably lead to more blowing out the other. Swift goes as far as to suggest that was why women were more talkative.
19. The Swedes mistook farting fish for nuclear submarines
During the Cold War, Sweden became increasingly concerned about Russian nuclear submarines entering their waters as surveillance equipment regularly picked up tell-tale sounds of strange activity. In 1982, the Swedish military spent a month chasing a mysterious intruder with zero success, and the concerns continued well into the 1990s, after the Cold War had ended.
Except, there were no subs. A biology professor named Magnus Wahlberg discovered that the sounds had instead been made by large shoals of herring as they communicated, which they did by blowing air out of their backsides. Coincidentally enough, there were no more subs after that.
20. Two films claim to be the first with a fart – but neither are
Arguably the most iconic scene in Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy Western, Blazing Saddles, involves a campfire, beans and a dozen cowboys breaking into a symphony of burps and bottom burps. Immature, certainly, but it broke an important barrier in Hollywood as the first time that wind was broken (and it was a lot of wind).
That said, another comedy, Cold Turkey, had shown a single toot a few years earlier. It just wasn’t enough to blow the doors open like Blazing Saddles. Ironically, a tagline for Cold Turkey – which is about the tobacco industry – is “battle of the butt”.
In reality, Yasujirō Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning uses farting as a reoccurring gag. So, it turns out the award for the first case of breaking wind on the silver screen goes to neither of these claimants.
Gene Wilder (left) and Cleavon Little in the comedy western Blazing Saddles, 1974. The film – which features a particularly flatulence-heavy scene – was one of the first to show characters breaking wind | Credit: Getty Images
21. Farts are always funny – just ask Leslie Nielsen
The Airplane! and The Naked Gun star, and supreme master of deadpan humour, Leslie Nielsen, always carried an electronic fart machine in his pocket, which he would surreptitiously deploy while in restaurants or on talk shows.
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So committed was he to the bit that, following his death in 2010, his family made sure to bury him with the device in his coffin. If a simple fart gag is good enough for comedy royalty, that’s enough for the rest of us, surely? It should be, and don’t call me Shirley.
Authors
Jonny WilkesFreelance writer
Jonny Wilkes is a former staff writer for BBC History Revealed, and he continues to write for both the magazine and HistoryExtra. He has BA in History from the University of York.
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