Fart Jokes
Why did Piglet stick his head in the toilet? … To look for Pooh!
Oh, you’ve heard that one, have you?
Well, why do ducks have butt feathers? … To cover their butt quacks!!!
No?
How about, why was the eight-year-old cancer patient so excited for her birthday? ... She was ready to benign.
What, too soon?
In 2012, comedian Tig Notaro got up on stage and presented what has now become a seminal performance (you can listen to a blurb of it from an episode of This American Life HERE). Opening with the words, “Hello, good evening, hello. I have cancer,” Notaro confronted the fresh news of her breast cancer diagnosis in front of a crowd of strangers, unaware of whether it would be funny, or well-received, or even something she could get through with composure. In her act, she brought a raw vulnerability to the stage, offering a heartbreaking confessional that made her audience recoil, take pause, and laugh out loud with a full spectrum of discomfort and appreciation.
Humour is a powerful too. It is how our culture confronts realities and truths that are otherwise inaccessible to collective discussion. It is how we find common ground on things big and small, enjoying pleasure in the ridiculous eccentricities that bind us together and to this life experience. And it is also how individuals find ways to cope with things too big to handle with gravity and rigidness.
In our family, it’s all about the fart jokes. Most of the time, I cringe at the thought that Violet takes stories of our antics into the classroom. A few times I’ve heard her wisecrack to her friends about what goes on behind closed doors at our house – things most mothers would be appalled to have known to the world. But all that horseplay and embarrassing buffoonery is like glue to our family unit. It makes the tough times easier, and wraps us in a warm blanket of intimacy.
Earlier this week, Violet had her stem cells harvested. You’d think they’d come up with better terminology other than comparing it to pruning the farm fields for corn. But I guess, essentially, it’s the same thing. Churn the vegetation – or in this case, plasma – through the machinery, siphon of the nutrients, and add the extra back into the soil.
They harvested her stem cells to store for down the road, when her 5 months of induction chemotherapy is done and they’ve cut out everything they can in surgery and they’ve hammered her body with additional high dose chemo rounds to make extra sure they got all of the traces. All that toxicity will render her body unable to recreate healthy stem cells self-sufficiently, and so they will need to retransplant her own back into her.
Hilarious, right?
Violet and I were playing this tabletop basketball game in the Oncology ward the other day (she totally bogarts this toy every time we are admitted to the outpatient ward, and I think she pisses the other sick kids off). During each game, her little plastic ball kept catapulting over the net and under the hospital bed. Every time I’d go to get it, she’d take my ball and get a few shots in when I was occupied on the floor. After losing enough rounds to damage my dignity, I said to her, “how many times do you think you get to play this cancer card, Chief? ‘Poor Violet, can’t get out of her wheelchair. Better let her win…”
To be fair, she can get out of her wheelchair. And do cartwheels for that matter. So there.
When does humour become cringeworthy? When is it in bad taste? When are we able to open our minds to seeing something differently – something maybe totally uncomfortable – in order to take a more productive stance and find a perspective that serves us better?
In this case, Violet’s laughter at that comment was my permission. In fact, so much laughter came out of that basketball session that multiple nurses popped their heads in the door to comment. “Excuse me, don’t you know you are on the cancer ward? This is a place of sadness, not joy, thank you very much.”
Was the laughter out of place? Did it make other people that were having a darker day feel uncomfortable? Maybe. But likely the sound of glee opened up space for others to consider a different view. Even when things are as dark as they can get, there is always space where the light can shine in.
“You know Mom, you are the funniest person I know,” Violet said to me as I wiped her bum with chemo protective gloves the other day (one day she’ll read this and be really pissed about it). “I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in years.”
It’s true. Without any intentionality, laughter has truly become our best medicine. It soothes us, embraces us, cracks open the window and lets the air in. It pulls air into the belly and lets the breath circulate oxygen into the muscles. It clears the pathway to the heart and relaxes the elephant’s grip on the chest – those hundred-pound heels that threaten to crush the soul.
Violet’s sense of humour is broad and deep and mature, and always has been. She is capable to taking the dark stuff with the light, and using it to manipulate the way she looks at things. But the feathery, playful effervescence of a good fart joke is able to bubble up through the thickest sludge and find its way into the air, reminding us all that life truly stinks sometimes, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be hilarious.