When you are a celebrity who has died and passed into being a culture icon, there is never any shortage of stories about you. It is why people still speak about Natalie Wood today and why now, an iconic television producer’s memoir is revealing Judy Garland really enjoyed a good gas passing joke.
George Schlatter — the 93-year-old founder of the American Comedy Awards — tells a story about The Wizard of Oz actress in his new book titled Still Laughing: A Life in Comedy, now available for purchase. While claims about Garland loving toot humor have circulated before, this is one of the first times a more in-depth story has been aired out and according to Schlatter’s memoir, her love of this was very intense.
“But the all-time best way to get her to relax involved flatulence. She loved fart jokes. A good fart joke would absolutely cause her to lose it. One day she had gotten mad at me onstage, and I played a long, loud selection of farts. The biggest and loudest farts anyone had ever heard, and they were edited to play out a melody. Forget about it. She almost couldn’t sing that night. I mean she just tore her throat out, screaming and hollering and pounding on the stage. And I said, ‘Judy, please do not test me anymore. Do you know what I had to eat to make that recording? I am exhausted.’ To the day she died, she had a copy of that tape, which she had said was the most treasured memento of our relationship.”
Elsewhere in the excerpt — which can be found on Talkhouse — Schlatter adds she would sometimes call his home at 3 a.m. and play a copy of the farting medley before hanging up and, when they were working on her self-titled variety show together from 1963-64, they would have intense fights which ended in laughs.
“As I got down off the coffee table, she pulled a lamp out of the wall and chased me down the steps, through her candy-striped makeup room, and down her little yellow brick road, yelling, ‘I’ll get you, I’ll get you, you son of a bitch, I’ll get you. [Expletive]!!!’ And of course it struck me as funny: I’m being chased down the hall by America’s little girl and sweetheart, and she is swinging a lamp to try to kill me. It struck her as funny too, and we both laughed. We fell down on her yellow brick road laughing. Then we went back into the studio. The whole experience maybe lasted under three minutes.”
After the show’s cancellation Garland would die of an accidental barbiturate overdose in 1969. Her funeral — which it is assumed Schlatter went to — was closed to the public and members of the press and today, Garland’s legacy lives on through her collaboration with Schlatter — which can be seen on YouTube — and her countless iconic performances in cinema which ensure immortality long after the mortal life ends.