The Rake Gag is a scene from the television program The Simpsons, in which one of the main characters steps on a rake. The rake then flips up in such a way that the handle hits him in the face.
This is a classic comedy gag, but in this case the writers had the same character step on another rake, followed by another, and another. In total, the gag repeated itself 9 times in about 40 seconds. The full sequence can be watched here.
It is interesting to watch the Rake Gag, because it is initially funny, then not very funny, then funny again, but in a different way. By the end of the sequence, the humor is in the fact of the repetition, which entails a kind of meta-joke. We suspect that this progression is related to the psychological phenomenon of semantic satiation.
It is well known that a sequence of farts can be very funny, and in a previous post, we demonstrated scientifically that longer farts are funnier than shorter ones. This led us to wonder whether an extraordinarily long fart might evoke an effect similar to that of the Rake Gag, in which the initial hilariousness of the fart sound gives way to an appreciation of its absurd duration. For this, we turned to The Ringer, a highly talented flatulist who was able to produce a fart of nearly 20 seconds. We then looped the fart, to produce this 60 second output:
Readers are encouraged to listen to the fart and monitor their own subjective experience of humor. We would appreciate any comments via our feedback system.