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Since the age of cavemen, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the Flintstones was America's favorite sitcom, men have laughed at each other's farts. The reason: farts are inherently funny. They satisfy the four golden rules of humor:
1. Farts are loud
2. Farts are unexpected (or sometimes comically predictable)
3. Farts smell bad
4. Farts have the ability to make an entire room of men groan, cover their noses with the collars of their t-shirts, and then punch the perpetrator
Flatulence has inspired both poetry and sport. "Whoever smelt it,/ Dealt it" was probably the first poem I ever memorized. "No, whoever made the rhyme,/ Did the crime" was the second. And the first time I ever analyzed poetry was when I realized that both poems rhymed, so it was actually impossible to figure out who had farted. One of my first contact sports was "doorknob," a game in which whoever farts gets beat to a pulp, with weaponry and eye-gouging totally acceptable forms of punishment, until he touches a doorknob.
In short, farts are absolutely the funniest thing that God has ever invented.
This fact was artfully illustrated on Saturday night when I was watching television with six other guys in an apartment in New York. The general pattern of conversation was as follows: silence, Sloan farting, violent reaction to Sloan's fart, analysis of Sloan's fart, discussion of farting in general, anecdotes about great farts in history, silence, Sloan farting... This is what men do, and it's why no car holding two or more guys ever becomes awkward.
But women, as a species, think differently. You see, it wasn't just the seven of us guys in that apartment in New York. My girlfriend was also there, and because she is a female, she doesn't think farts are funny. This flaw in the female psyche is the result of a missing humor neuron in their brains. It's the same part of their brains that would allow them to make machine gun sound effects. As men, we just have to be understanding of this female handicap, and know that when our girlfriend has been subjected to a half hour of conversation about flatulence, we can be 100% certain that we're about to hear the words "compromise" or "sacrifice" in the very near future.
So as we were sitting in the testosterone-filled apartment, La Girlfriend told me that her friends were at Tortilla Flats, a Mexican restaurant with "great margaritas" and we should go meet up with them soon. "After smelling and discussing your farts for a half hour," she said, "I think you can sit in on a conversation about shoes." So this is what it all boiled down to: Farts vs. Shoes. My Boys vs. Her Girls.
I picked up my jacket. I didn't have a choice. It was either go with the girls or hang out with the guys and risk being locked out of La Girlfriend's apartment, forced to sleep in the hallway, which smells alternately like chlorine and Indian food. I high-fived all the guys and said that I was leaving. They said maybe we would meet up later but I shook my head. We would probably never see each other again.
Tortilla Flats is a fun place to go if you're a person who enjoys Madonna and refers to skinny male bartenders with low cut sweatshirts, eurohawks, and holes in the ass of thier jeans as "eye candy." If you don't fit that description, you might feel like Jerry Falwell at a Muslims for Gay Marriage convention. But I was prepared to be a Good Supportive Boyfriend Who Doesn't Mind Just Hanging Out with the Girls from Time to Time. After all, relationships are about "compromise" and "sacrifice."
Or they're about steering a conversation back towards farting and, just for added difficulty points, pooping. The girls were resistant at first, claiming that farts were not funny: "We don't laugh when someobdy farts. We just say, 'Oh my God, Cindy. You're disgusting!'" But then they relaxed a little and came close to admitting that there was at least a little humor in flatulence.
The conversation drifted back towards shoes and I didn't have anything to add so I just ate chips and salsa. At one point I looked up and realized that a shoe was actually on the table. Apparently it had a smudge on the toe and we were all supposed to use our napkins to rub it off. This was an important shoe because it's the same kind that Carrie from Sex and the City wears. I decided we needed to stop talking about shoes so I announced that I had never hooked up with a girl who had undergone a cliterectomy. This statement was mostly ignored and then we went back to cleaning the shoe.
Later in the night, I thought we were crossing a street in the Meatpacking district, but when I got halfway across the crosswalk, I realized that we were missing three of the girls. They were waiting on the corner, demanding piggy-back rides across a slush puddle, so as to preserve the cleanliness of their shoes.
Here's what I don't get: guys don't look at shoes. They're mostly covered by pants and they go on the body part which is the farthest from eye level. It would make much more sense for women to spend a lot of money on shirts or hats or breasts. And I know they do, but still - buy your shoes at Payless and save your money for something worthwhile like a fart machine.
Of course, traveling with a pack of attractive women isn't entirely a bad thing. For every few cons, there is a pro. Like women don't have to wait in line at bars or pay cover charges at the door. They go in the side door. They also don't always have to buy drinks. Drinks are paid for by guys who say, "I'm Mo and I have a Lexus and an apartment."
The other good thing about hanging out with La Girlfriend's friends is that I now have a surplus of about one hundred Relationhip Points. Next time I go to New York, she has to come out with the boys and we get to fart as much as we want. It would be nice if she at least pretended to enjoy it, but it's not her fault if she can't. She's a woman, and women don't get fart jokes.
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