How Blazing Saddles Pinpointed The Perfect Number Of Farts

A short while into Mel Brooks' 1974 comedy Western "Blazing Saddles," the smug a-hole cowboy Lyle (Burton Gilliam) takes a break after a hard day of abusing railroad workers to have a dinner of beans by a campfire. He is surrounded by many other a-hole cowboys, also enjoying their fire-roasted baked beans. As we all know beans to be the musical fruit, the inevitable happens, and one of the cowboys unleashes an audible explosion of flatulence. No one acknowledges it, perhaps knowing that it is a natural part of a bean dinner. Audience members watching "Blazing Saddles" likely rolled their eyes at the fart, feeling that Brooks had stooped a little low in order to employ a fart joke.

The audience's eyerolls become more pronounced with the release of a second fart. A second cowboy affects a strained look of intestinal clenching. Ha, ha, Mel. That's also not funny.

But then there's a third. And a fourth. The camera rests on the campfire, a wide shot of a dozen cowboys. They burp in addition to farting. They fart some more. The gas expulsions begin to overlap in what can only be called an orchestral fanfare. The fart joke goes from being a single jejune giggle into sublime comedic genius. The scene lasts a full minute, and it's the greatest fart sequence in the history of cinema.

Brooks, a careful student of comedy, knew exactly how long that scene needed to go on and that it required a little fine-tuning to get just right. He also knew exactly on which fart audiences would begin laughing, and which fart ripped when audiences would begin to back off from the joke. In a 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brooks laid out the numbers very cleanly. There is such thing, he found, as too many farts.

The EW interviewer was wise enough to point out the Rule of Threes, a far-reaching writing rule that dictates that jokes tend to be funnier when presented in triads. Three people walk into a bar, for instance, and the third person will be the one to deliver the punchline. Or perhaps a repeated running gag won't be funny until it has been iterated at least three times. Twice isn't enough. Four is too many.

Brooks might have made the fart scene in "Blazing Saddles" work with only three farts. Once? Not funny. Twice. Still not funny. A third, louder, bigger fart? Perhaps. Brooks, however, not content to rest his sphincters, kept on pushing. It seems, though, that the final magical number was also a multiple of three. The scene, when counted out accurately, features an exact number of farts. Brooks explained:

"I had a rough cut, and maybe I had 16 farts. Things didn't get exciting until the fourth or fifth one, and the laughter began to diminish around the 12th fart, so I said, 'Okay, cut it off at 12.' I did it kind of systematically. I do a lot of homework."

Of course, the length of each fart varies and they were punctuated by belches, so the actual number of farts may be difficult to determine. It's possible that several of the 12 farts were broken into two shorter audible explosions, making it sound more like 20 farts.

It's also likely that Brooks was operating by instinct and oversaw the fart sound mixing until it merely felt right; fart jokes may not be as scientific as all that. When pressed, though, Brooks happily pulled an answer out of his, uh, ear.