National Pass Gas Day

The world's oldest recorded joke is a fart joke. A 2008 study led by Dr Paul McDonald of the University of Wolverhampton named, as the oldest joke with a clear setup and punchline, a Sumerian proverb dated to about 1900 BC. It runs: something that has never happened since time immemorial is a young woman who did not break wind in her husband's lap.

From there the gag kept good company. Aristophanes built it into The Clouds in 423 BC, teaching that thunder is the fart of the clouds. Centuries later, Suetonius reported that the emperor Claudius is even said to have considered an edict permitting diners to break wind at the table, after a man nearly killed himself holding it in. Suetonius hedged the claim himself, and historians read it as banquet gossip, not law.

Chaucer carried it into English. In The Miller's Tale, written in the 1390s, a clerk lets fly a fart as loud as a thunderclap into a rival's face. His Summoner's Tale turns a single enormous fart into a riddle about how to divide it twelve ways, a jab at clerical greed.

The tradition never died. Paul Oldfield, the British flatulist known as Mr. Methane, reached Britain's Got Talent in 2009 with a flatulent Blue Danube. Edo-period Japan had already turned the subject into fine art with its He-gassen, or fart battle, scrolls.

National Pass Gas Day arrived at the very end of this line, and arrived quietly. No founder, proclamation, or origin record is documented for it, and nothing explains the January 7 date. The earliest credible online listings appear around 2013, which places it among internet-era novelty days. The history it can claim is not its own founding but the centuries of jokes it tips its hat to.