While “male humor” is a pretty broad spectrum, for better or worse, fart jokes (or flatulence humor, if you are being fancy) is part of it. Indeed, it is, in many ways, a time-honored tradition, going back to ancient Sumer. Not only did they perhaps invent, among other things, the fart joke, fart jokes might be one of the oldest recorded topics of humor on the planet.
For those who are curious, it goes like this “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Not, perhaps, the greatest joke of all time, but we can at least see their thought process.
It wasn’t just the Mesopotamians who were into flatulence, it shows up as a form of humor in numerous Greek plays. The ancient Romans, loving all things Greek copied this motif, for example, an excerpt from The Pumpkinification of Claudius: “At once he bubbled up the ghost, and there was an end to that shadow of a life…The last words he was heard to speak in this world were these. When he had made a great noise with that end of him which talked easiest, he cried out, "Oh dear, oh dear! I think I have made a mess of myself."”
Importantly, it’s not just the ancients who maintained this. Mark Twain has made them, the first chapter of Moby-Dick contains one, “I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim),” so at the end of the day, we might be forced to conclude that fart jokes are here to stay.
