Dear D.M.,

For a boy of your son’s age, nothing is more natural than to be fascinated with bodily functions In fact, there is a reasonable explanation why your son finds this particular fact of life so amusing: because flatulence is very, very funny.

Finding the humor in the topic can admittedly be rather subjective. Flatulence in an elevator, for example, can be hilarious when it occurs in a movie. Flatulence in an elevator is not so funny when you are actually riding the elevator. From expereince I can also attest to the fact that being forced to take the stairs after being banned from ever riding the elevator again isn’t very funny either.

The reason we laugh at flatulence is because it is completley absurd. After all, we are beings created in the “image of God”, destined to exist for eternity and, as the Bible says, made to be “just a little lower than the angels.” And yet we all, as your son would say, “toot.”

Anyone who can’t appreciate the humor in God creating self-serious humans to be flatulent is missing out one of the funniest jokes in the cosmos. In fact, the type of person who can’t appreciate the preposterous humor in our having “natural bodily functions” is probably the type who also believes that we’re descended from what is indisputably God’s all-time funniest creation - the monkey.

Obviously, your son possesses the instinct of a natural theologian. But religion isn’t the only topic on which he can glean life lessons from bodily emissions. Flatulence can be a starting point to introduce him to all manner of subjects:

Use it to introduce great works of art -- Your son shares an interest with some of the world’s comic geniuses. Throughout history, some of the most profound artists have found humor in the subject of flatulence. His interest can be a gateway to works of art that also deal with the subject, masterpieces such a Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison.

Use it to introduce your son to science -- You could also use his inherent fascination to inform him about basic scientific principles, such as “cause-and-effect” relationships. When I was your son’s age my mother explained that eating beans led to the production of indigestible enzymes in my stomach which causes a build-up of gas in the intestines.

My father, who was always more of the “show” than “tell” type, used the subject to demonstrate the consistency of the laws of nature. His experiments usually began with the words, “Here, pull my finger…”

Use it to explain gender differences – Finally, you could use the topic to explain to your son the biological differences between men and women. Men, for example, have horrible, toxic, gaseous emissions while women produce no gas at all.

Girls, of course, continue to produce foul emission until the age of sixteen, at which time they cease to have this particular bodily function.(If their bodies malfunction and they continue to produce gas after age sixteen, they will simply die of embarrassment. This is how “natural selection” works.)

This also explains why women don’t mind going to the restroom in groups while a man wouldn’t accompany other men unless he was toting along a gas mask.