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Wikipedia for the Weird: This guy gets paid to fart

Who has the best job in the world? Some beloved Hollywood A-lister? Nope. Paul Oldfield. He gets paid to travel around the world and fart.

 

Mike Fenn

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 22, 2013   Updated on Jun 1, 2021, 11:51 pm CDT

Who has the best job in the world? Some beloved Hollywood A-lister? A respected scientist, perhaps, who has personally contributed to the advancement of human knowledge?

Nope. The best title in history is held by Paul Oldfield. He gets paid to travel around the world and fart.

And he has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to him.

Like most celebrities’ Wikipedia presences, Oldfield, who is dubbed “Mr. Methane,” has his life history, craft secrets, and more detailed on the page. 

“Oldfield discovered his ability at the age of fifteen when practising yoga. The next day he performed twenty rapid fire rasping farts in under a minute for a group of his friends. It became so popular he made it into a regular event,” the article reads.

According to the sidebar, Mr. Methane has been active in “performance fart” (yes, that is a thing) since 1991. The British performer’s influences include the late Le Petomane, a fellow “flatulist” (yes, that is also a thing).

In the article’s Talk section, some users initially believed Mr. Methane’s talent to be fake.

“I saw his Britain’s got Talent performance on Youtube and other videos and to be honest I think the farts sound fake, does anyone agree?” one editor commented.

A fellow user begged to differ.

“If you saw what he did on Das Supertalent (Germany’s Got Talent), then you would beg to differ. After exposing his bare bottom – while lying flat on his back and legs up in the air – he inserted a straw, loaded with a dart, into his anus and farted it out with enough velocity to send the projectile right in to a large balloon,” the user wrote.

The talk resulted in fellow editors adding a list of official sources verifying not only Mr. Methane himself, but also his abilities.

External links from the page connect curious users to Mr. Methane’s IMDB page, official website, and even his Myspace page (what professional fartist would be complete without a Myspace presence?).

Whether impressed or disgusted by his talents, one thing can be said about Mr. Methane’s contributions to the world of music: his renditions of “Happy Birthday,” displayed on his YouTube channel, are far more entertaining than anything sung by a group of off-key, bored family members.

Photo via astrocoz/Flickr

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*First Published: Feb 22, 2013, 11:16 am CST