When I saw that a dude in California had launched a Kickstarter selling Farts in a Jar, I was a little nonplussed. Oh lovely, another brilliant stunt like the$55,000 Potato Salad or the thing where you send your frenemies a pound-and-a-half of shit. (That box of glitter was pretty rad though — and cheaper too).
But Fart in a Jar is real. At least, it’s a Spencer's Gifts-style joke that’s meant to be real. Creator Roy Stanton is a sales professional who grew frustrated trying to garner attention for his ideas on an Internet “that’s become this titillating celebrity marketplace of crap,” as he put it. So he came up with a simple concept: Bottle farts from 80 different countries and sell them online.
The surprising thing is that Fart in a Jar has a backstory that, once sulfurous fumes dissipate, is almost sweet.
Stanton has a wheezy, infectious laugh, not unlike the brother from Car Talk who passed away last year, only with an Aussie accent. He spoke to me by phone from Melbourne, where it turns out he’s involuntarily marooned pending the resolution of a hiccup with US Immigration. He’s desperate to get home to Pasadena, but it’s been four months already. (You can read all about it on a separate GiveForward campaign, but in a nutshell, a youthful indiscretion involving a stolen car is keeping him out of the country and away from his sick wife).
Now, I did not — and still do not — believe Stanton actually captured farts from people in 80 countries, especially in borderline unpopulated places like the Cook Islands, where, he said, “you get on an electric scooter and zoom around the island and collect farts on the run.”
At first, Stanton answered my questions with deadpan sales talk or shopworn jokes about how French farts are chemically loaded with camembert and garlic. But when I said I thought this was all an elaborate prank, his tone changed. Yes, Stanton created it in ten minutes, but it’s sincere. Fart in a Jar isn’t cynical, although it does spoof crowdfunding. It also acknowledges a universal human experience. Is he surprised it passed the censors? Ironically, Stanton has attempted crowdfunding before and “gotten nothing but grief from Kickstarter over the most anal-retentive little details they didn’t like. I posted Fart in a Jar and didn’t get a peep.”
If Fart in a Jar were to go viral, would Stanton and his wife apply the proceeds to his immigration quagmire? “No,” he said. “Not a one. We’ll do exactly what we said we’d do and actually produce Fart in a Jar. You can see the cost of the rewards is basically going to cover the cost of the jars and the package. We’re not out there to exploit it for our personal good.” He added, “This has gone in a direction I never would have assumed in a million years."
In essence, Roy Stanton is a restless guy in a jam. Estranged from his wife and daughter because of a silly incident 30 years ago, he’s basically killing time with a project meant to lampoon the Internet. Maybe you can’t bottle lightning but you can harvest flatulence, and hope the web's inherent ridiculousness helps you pass the time — along with the gas.
Photo courtesy of Thinkstock.
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