Farts on Fire

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    "In China it's considered perfectly good manners to talk with your mouth full and to burp after your meal. Farting seems to vary according to the situation and your current company, so ask ahead of time. Lighting the fart is frowned upon in almost all provinces."
    —Cracked, Seven Gestures That Can Get You Killed Overseas

    Flatulence is set aflame.

    This does work in Real Life, though not always, and not very impressively. Despite the fact that it is Truth in Television, Don't Try This At Home.

    Science fact: farts are, essentially, just the body expelling methane. Methane also flees quickly. Timing is required. Rather than the huge flame you see in certain cartoons, it'll be a tiny blink-and-you'll-miss-it flame. Don't ask us how we know.[1]

    Fartillery is this taken to its illogical extreme.

    Examples of Farts on Fire include:

    Anime and Manga

    • In an anime adaptation episode of Kochikame at near the end, a fellow officer demonstrate farting fire. Ryotsu, not being concerned of the whole police box is stashed with heating oil, dynamite, tanker trucks, military weapons, and along with a locker full of matches, lets him do so resulting in at least a square kilometer of city destruction.

    Comics

    Film

    • Dumb and Dumber
    • Wet Hot American Summer does this at the talent show.
    • Shown in Werner Herzog's Stroszek.
    • The Tank Battalion (1991). The Political Officer asks the Czech conscripts what they do in their spare time. While the soldier asked is lying about their fervent study of political works, a flashback shows them lying naked on their bunks, holding in their farts until as someone runs from one man to the other with a lighted match, producing long streams of blue flame.
    • Freaked (1993). One of the freaks is called "The Human Flame" for this reason.
    • Papa Klump farts on a candlestick and sets a restaurant on fire in The Nutty Professor II.
    • The ending of Shrek the Third. An ogre baby farts, then a donkey/dragon baby sneezes on the fart, lighting it on fire and causing it to change directions and light the fireplace.
    • Kids in Return to Sleepaway Camp have some fun with this.
    • Tremors 3 takes this trope to the extreme. The Assblasters are capable of propelling themselves to flight at high altitudes by igniting their own farts. One even used this technique to try and burn through Burt's bomb shelter.
    • In the 1993 Live-Action film of Dennis The Menace, when Dennis is (unknowingly) held captive by a burglar, and he is accidentally handcuffed by Dennis, Dennis accidentally drops the release keys into a cooking pot of beans, since "Food is not wasted" Dennis force-feeds him the entire pot making him to fart near the fire causing a big flame.
    • In Critters 3, when the title creatures (who are Extreme Omnivores) invade the protagonist's department one of them eats a can of beans and does this with the flame of the stove.
    • In the comedy Caveman, one of the rival cavemen gets his butt lit on fire, he runs around farting and emitting jets of flame.
    • In Black Sheep, the fact that their fart contains large amounts of methanol is used to blow up the flesh eating sheeps
    • In the World War 2 drama Harts War, one scene briefly shows the Allied prisoners amusing themselves in their barracks by doing this.
    • In Superhero Movie, Rick's sleeping aunt farts next to a candle, resulting in a huge, flamethower-sized jet of flame shooting between Rick and his girlfriend.
    • In Joy of Sex the Blue Flamers at the drive-in.
    • In Weekend Warriors they settle a bet with this.

    Literature

    • Dave Barry's column "Apocalypse Cow" tells of a university professor who set fire to methane emitted by cows for classroom demonstration purposes.
    • Not played for laughs: In Stephen King's novel IT, a fart-lighting scene leads to a homosexual encounter between two of the Bad kids. It's one of the most suspenseful scenes in the book, because the whole thing is witnessed by one of the Good kids.
    • Happens in Lois McMaster Bujold's The Vor Game, where the main character, dubbed the camp idiot for a (rigged) accident with a piece of major equipment, is relieved when the title is taken over by a couple of new recruits who set their tent on fire lighting "fart flares."
    • Recounted in Spike Milligan's memoir, Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.
    • One of James Herriott's autobiographic novels features a story (well, urban legend, actually; see Real Life below) about gastric surgery on a bovine and a demonstration of the flammability of stomach gas. Hilarity Ensues as the resulting burst of flame is quite a lot bigger than anticipated...
    • Elmer the Fire Farter in a Stephanie Plum spinoff, Plum Spooky.

    Live-Action TV

    • A fantasy-version of Rygel the 16th as the Black Knight uses this as a weapon in Farscape.
    • The MythBusters tried it (in a segment they could not air in the USA but did overseas...and the US execs finally relented for the anniversary "Top 25" special). Although the flatulence was flammable, the flame itself was fairly unimpressive and it didn't remove the smell at all.
    • In The Young Ones episode Cash, Vyvyan thinks he's pregnant, backed up by his rapidly expanding gut. Turns out it was just gas. Right after it's released someone(I think Rik), lights a cigar, and blows the house up.
      • It was Mike. When Vyv started 'going into labour', he left the room because he didn't want to watch, and came back after the fart had filled the air to congratulate Vyv. Clearly from this scene, Mike has no sense of smell.
    • Stephen Colbert attempted this to demonstrate how to fix the oil spill in the gulf. It didn't go so well and we instead got some Relax-O-Vision as the stagehands put him out. On the bright side, he doesn't need to worry about that waxing appointment anymore.
    • A segment of a bizarre German game show featured a sort of "word of the day." The clue was as follows: A woman in lingerie bends over, and the camera does a close-up of her butt. A flame is brought near it, and the result is something like a Bunsen burner. (The word of the day was, of course, "gas.")
    • Happened in the christmas episode of Bottom. Richie had meade a special christmas snack containing year-old sprouts, as well as other rather nasty and spicy ingrediants. The guys all passed out and when they woke up they were randomly spouting and fire from their asses.
    • In the I'm in The Band episode "Don't Date the Principal's Daughter", Burger does this on Derek after Ash, who pulls his finger in order to make him burp fire (because he accidentally discovered earlier that pulling the wrong finger will result in a burp when it's Burger), but fails hilariously
    • Happens at least twice in 1000 Ways to Die.
    • Happens in House MD, when the team is operating on a Hikikomori with an intestinal blockage. A doctor goes to cauterize a bleed... "Hey, wait! The gas..." *FOOSH!*

    Music

    • Ass Burners. They got it depicted on one of their albums' covers. It's a grindcore/black metal project, of course.
    • The Genesis song Suppers Ready has the lyric "Oooh, can't you feel our souls ignite...". This has inevitably led to the Mondegreen "can't you feel arseholes ignite".
    • Hammerfall's "Hearts on Fire" is commonly mondegreened into this very trope title. "Burning, burning with desire," indeed.

    Newspaper Comics

    Stand Up Comedy

    • British stand-up comic Jasper Carrott was one of the first people to popularize the idea on his album The UnRecorded Jasper Carrott.

    Video Games

    • Mortal Kombat: Deception: Bo Rai Cho's Fartality.
    • 'Splosion Man seems to 'splode like this from time to time.
    • Chimchar from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl has a flame coming out of its buttocks whenever it's awake.
      • Also, Reshiram actually has the ability to shoot flames out of its tail.
        • Same with Skuntank.
    • In Dragon Age, if you try to tell Oghren's ex-girlfriend Felsi that he's more fun than other men she probably knows, she'll say "If by 'more fun' you mean 'more likely to light farts on fire.'" And this isn't even the dumbest of his antics that she recalls. . .

    Web Comics

    • Slack Wyrm, being a dragon, did this.

    Web Original

    Western Animation

    • South Park Bigger Longer and Uncut kick-starts with this.
      • This is also played in Terrence and Phillip's Movie Within A Movie Asses of Fire, and Kenny dies while attempting the stunt.
      • Flaming flatulence featured in the very first episode, Cartman Gets an Anal Probe. "Dude, you're farting fire!"
    • Beavis and Butthead Do America. It causes a mushroom cloud.
    • One episode of Beavis and Butthead consists nearly entirely of Beavis in a hospital emergency room, face-down on a gurney, whimpering in agony, with his pants burnt off around his blackened butt. At one point, flames shoot out of his butt, propelling the gurney some twenty feet, with Beavis screaming in pain. It's never adequately explained what led up to this, leaving it to the viewer's imagination.
    • One episode of Family Guy had the Griffins develop superpowers from toxic waste; when Chris discovers he's pyrokinetic, Peter gets the idea to do this, resulting in a long trail of flame.
      • In another, the universe is a result of God lighting one.
    • In Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure, several cans of beans are used by the titular character to blow up Jabba the Hutt, and his palace with him. And that's the least bizarre part of that particular short.
    • Accidentally used in Duckman to fuel a campfire.
    • This is actually one of the many superpowers Johnny Test gained as Johnny X as a result of one of his sisters' giving him mutant powers.

    Johnny X: Power poots, go!

    Real Life

    • In Real Life, pig farms have to be routinely ventilated, or else they risk exploding.
      • The ammonia would kill them before the risk of explosion would. At high enough concentrations, ammonia can blind a person and make them suffer severe respiratory consequences.
    • This was given in The Book of Heroic Failures, listing an episode in which a vet attending a cow in a barn stuck a tube into "that end which is not capable of facial expression" and struck a light. The resulting jet of flame set fire to the barn.
    • There is at least one Darwin Awards story with this. It backfired into the guy's rectum. Ouch.
    1. ↑ Oh, and if you're unlucky, you may char your lower intestine. So, really, just don't. What are you, anyway? A vulgarite? Get a hobby.
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