(corresponding to “Topping the Bill”)

At end of the Nineteenth century, Joseph Pujol was presented to Parisians by the Moulin Rouge for his incomparable performance of farts. In French he was called Le Petomane; translated into English, the “Fartiste”.

Finely dressed in a red coat and black satin breeches with a vent for his buttock, gesturing for effect with white-gloved hands, he explained with deadpan to the audience that his emissions were completely odorless, since he irrigated his colon daily.

He opened his act with fart impressions: a new bride’s timid toot; her long-winded emission after her first night of connubial pleasures; the booming fart of a miller; and the imitation of a dress maker tearing two-yards of calico—a ten-second-rip. He did impressions of famous people and blew out candles and the gas footlights from yards away. He exploded like cannon fire and thundered like a storm. And that was just the first half of the show.

For the second half he retreated offstage and discretely inserted a rubber tube into his anus, which dangled out the back of his trousers. Using the tube he smoked two cigarettes at once, exhaling from bottom and top simultaneously. And as a grand finale he attached an ocarina to the end of the hose and played popular tunes—La Marseillaise, most notably—while beckoning the audience to sing along.

As his act matured he added a limerick about farmyard animals, which was punctuated with anal mimicry of animal sounds—pigs, chickens, cows, horses. And famously the climax of his act became his stupendous impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Astonishment devolved to contagion of laughter in the audience. Sometimes numbers of women passed out, unable to catch their breath because of laughter and their tight corsets, and had to be unbound in emergency. It is said his appreciative audiences included many notables, such as Sigmund Freud, whose psychiatric interpretation unfortunately is not recorded for us, and Edward the Prince of Wales who came on more than one occasion.