Who Farted?: Doc by prankster Nerenberg is a colourless, odourless 'gas,' with a whiff of serious overtones

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

Career prankster Albert Nerenberg never got to be Michael Moore or even Morgan Spurlock. But he’s worked hard at the “participatory documentary” game. And he sets the bar where they dare not in the opening of his latest film, Who Farted?

We meet Nerenberg at the World Fart Championships in Northern Finland, with a participant bent over, and flour sprinkled over his pants. Nerenberg leans in, and, a frap later, wears a face full of white powder and a grimace.

Filmmaker Albert Nerenberg interrogates a prime suspect in the doc Who Farted?

There are serious moments in this movie. Very serious – as when we consider the possibility of the Earth itself farting us into a lethal level of global warming, with the release of megatons of methane from the thawing Siberian permafrost.

But a punchline is never far away. We are talking about flatulence after all.

Who Farted? - co-directed by Nik Sheehan (FLicKeR) and making its world broadcast debut on the Documentary Channel Sunday - is putatively positioned as a call to environmental arms. It uses as a springboard a largely staged science presentation by Nerenberg’s daughter at her Kingston junior high about how farts could kill us all via cows and the greenhouse effect.

But mostly, it’s everything you could possibly say in 72 minutes about the biology, cultural history and historical and current pop cultural figures associated with farts..

(Points to Nerenberg for revealing that the Whoopee Cushion was a Canadian invention. But points deducted for not mentioning the most famous Canadian to ever use one for laughs, the late Leslie Nielsen, who never traveled without his gleaming metal-and-rubber fart-maker).

The first joke ever recorded carved in cuneiform was a fart joke. An Arabian Nights tale had it as a theme. Flatulence and its connection to the Devil makes its way into Paradise Lost and the Canterbury Tales. And the French made it an art-form in the person of Joseph Pujol, a.k.a. Le Pétomane, who claimed to inhale through his anus, thus permitting him to play wind instruments and put out candles.

Le Pétomane’s legacy lives on in the person of Mr. Methane, a Brit who does all the same tricks (and who we see described as “disgusting” by Simon Cowell during an audition on Britain's Got Talent .

(My Mr. Methane story: I saw his act years ago at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, where a furious Janeane Garofalo was ready to walk away on discovering she was following a fart act. She eventually went on, but was clearly not in a good mood through her set).

It’s a lot to take in about the release of gases. And – a save-the-planet speech by Harrison Ford notwithstanding – the  sometime seriousness of the message is all but lost in the minutiae and sniggering over the footage of farting babies and animals. (Did you know that birds don’t fart?).

And perhaps that’s just as well. Who Farted? makes its small screen debut at a time when one more thing that causes us anxiety is not what the doctor ordered. A good fart joke can be as therapeutic to us today as it was to the Sumerians.

Who Farted? Directed by Albert Nerenberg and Nik Sheehan. Starring Albert Nerenberg, Mr. Methane. World broadcast premiere 9 p.m., Sunday, June 28 on the Documentary Channel.