Jeff Bridges’ brother Beau is set to star in a show called The Millers on CBS this fall, a show which apparently contains a prominent fart joke. Critics pressed show creator Greg Garcia (pictured, left) on fart jokes during a Television Critics Association panel, leading Bridges to jokingly declare, “I will never fart on your show.”
In a brilliant piece of journalism, The AV Club went digging, and found out that there was some backstory to Bridges’ statement, and that Beau Bridges has a rich, some might even say nutty, history of farting on camera.
“I was just telling Margo and Will (Arnett) that one of the landmark moments of my performances as an actor is that I farted on Elizabeth Taylor one time, in a movie directed by Peter Ustinov. Not many people saw the movie—it was called Hammersmith Is Out—but I trained. I trained for days on cauliflower. And I pulled off three takes without having to go back for seconds of cauliflower. Just one after another. Bam, bam, bam. So if I’m called upon, if they paid me enough to do one, I may let one rip. You just never know.” [AV Club]
Cauliflower! I’ll be honest, cauliflower would not have been my first guess if you’d quizzed me on “what food did Beau Bridges use to synthesize his famous fart on Elizabeth Taylor in Hammersmith is Out” (hello, Jeopardy?). It probably wouldn’t have even been in the top 10. In her should’ve-been-Pulitzer-winning profile of a fart fetish porn star last June, Vanessa Chan, writing for Untapped Cities, reported that for fart fetish professionals, the fart inducer of choice is sugar-free candy:
Of course when talking to an expert on farting, I have to ask the question, what foods induce the best farts? You’d think it would lots of bean burritos, but no, the key is sugar-free candy. According to my farts-pert friend, any candy that comes in a sugar-free form such as Worthers or Twizzlers, or sugar-free cough drops are the secret to monster whopper farts. These candies contain sugar substitutes such as isomalt, malitol and sorbitol which, if eaten in excess, can even go so far as to induce “wet” farts.
Of course, in farting if not geopolitics, the truth is that the end justifies the means. So whether it’s Worther’s or sugar-free cough drops, I think it’s interesting that everyone has their own version of fartlore, which tells them which foods make them fartiest. I have a friend that claims eggs makes him gassy, whereas for myself, excessive amounts of beef give me a fierce case of the meat farts, which are the worst of all farts. Our friend Justin Halpern once worked as a waiter in LA where he had a competition with himself to see how many celebrities he could fart on in the course of his work, with his proudest achievement being a gasbomb delivered to Jennifer Love Hewitt. You wonder if his farting ability could be transferred via fart, like a werewolf bite.
Someday I hope to host a panel on the subject of on-camera farting. “Inside the Fart Actors Studio,” I could call it.
[Photo via Getty, all credit to reader Jack for the tip and that brilliant headline]