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100,000 units. Business was booming.
    One guy used it to perpetrate a fraud. In mid-October of 1998, he phoned Howard Stern’s morning radio program, calling himself the Phantom of the Colon, and claimed that he could beat the show’s then-current farting champion. But when Stern invited him to the studio to do his act, it quickly became obvious that he wasn’t really farting. He had hidden a Fart Machine in his pants.
    In recent years, the Fart Machine has become popular in Hollywood. During the filming of
The Score
(2001), actor Edward Norton reported that his costar, Marlon Brando, delighted in figuring out where Robert De Niro was going to be sitting in hisvarious scenes, and would then tape a Fart Machine under the chair. Brando, incidentally, had already delivered one of the classic early farts of American cinema in the 1976 film
The Missouri Breaks
, when his character told Jack Nicholson, “I feel an attack of gas and that could be perilous to both of us!”—followed by a Method fart.
    Actor Johnny Depp is also a big fan of the Fart Machine. He used it on the set of
Chocolat
(2000) to break the tension before his smooching scenes with Juliette Binoche, and then again to relax his costars, including several children, during a dinner scene in
Finding Neverland
(2004). In fact, in one of that film’s DVD special features called “The Magic of
Finding Neverland,”
as we hear the sounds of farting during dinner, Depp says in a voice-over, “We sort of saved the Fart Machine for certain moments. [Director] Marc [Forster] and I planned it out early on that we needed it to loosen that dinner scene up, so we hid the Fart Machine under the table and waited for the boys’ closeups and just started nailing ’em, and it worked like a charm.”
    During an appearance on ABC’s
Jimmy Kimmel Live
, on January 28, 2003, wrestler/actor Dwayne Johnson, better known as the Rock, joked about how he interrupted his love scene with costar Kelly Hu on the set of
The Scorpion King
by activating a few electronic farts.
    On the March 14, 2004, edition of ABC-TV’s
Primetime
, when host Diane Sawyer asked actress Jennifer Aniston, “Are you an easy laugh?” Aniston replied, “I’m such an easy laugh. I’m the one who has the Fart Machine and the fart sludge and that stuff, and make a pretty big fool of myself laughing ridiculously hard.”
    Aniston’s costar in 2005’s
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
, Australian actress Naomi Watts, is also quite a fan of the little noisemaker, according to http://teletextnewsletter.co.uk. In a love scene with Mark Ruffalo, “We were up against the tree, completely naked, trying to act this scene in front of all the crew and cameras,” said Ruffalo. “And then Naomi, to ease the tension, had a Fart Machine going. You’re about to do a scene, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Prrpt, prrt-prrrpt, prrt-prrrpt.’ Instant defuse.”
    Among other practical jokers who have zinged folks with Fart Machines are Cameron Diaz, Leslie Nielsen, and, according to an article in the
New York Daily News
, even President George W. Bush.
    “The Fart Machine has been an unprecedented success in the novelty business,” says Blackman. “It has been the number-one best-selling gag since 1992 at Spencer Gifts and other gag and novelty outlets. It is sold in fifty countries around the world, and we recently shipped a two thousand-piece order to a palace in Saudi Arabia.”
    Blackman is now bragging about an even more advanced version, the Fart Machine No. 2. “Pun intended,” he says. “[It] has fifteen farts now, and they’re louder than ever because we put in our own patented boom-box blaster for better bass response, and you can activate them from one hundred feet away.” There’s even a Fart Machine with a motion detector; like a land mine, it only needs to be activated and hidden away—until a victim comes by and sets it off. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, if you invent a better fart machine,