The EW interviewer was wise enough to point out the Rule of Threes, a far-reaching writing rule that dictates that jokes tend to be funnier when presented in triads. Three people walk into a bar, for instance, and the third person will be the one to deliver the punchline. Or perhaps a repeated running gag won’t be funny until it has been iterated at least three times. Twice isn’t enough. Four is too many.
Brooks might have made the fart scene in “Blazing Saddles” work with only three farts. Once? Not funny. Twice. Still not funny. A third, louder, bigger fart? Perhaps. Brooks, however, not content to rest his sphincters, kept on pushing. It seems, though, that the final magical number was also a multiple of three. The scene, when counted out accurately, features an exact number of farts. Brooks explained:
“I had a rough cut, and maybe I had 16 farts. Things didn’t get exciting until the fourth or fifth one, and the laughter began to diminish around the 12th fart, so I said, ‘Okay, cut it off at 12.’ I did it kind of systematically. I do a lot of homework.”
Of course, the length of each fart varies and they were punctuated by belches, so the actual number of farts may be difficult to determine. It’s possible that several of the 12 farts were broken into two shorter audible explosions, making it sound more like 20 farts.
It’s also likely that Brooks was operating by instinct and oversaw the fart sound mixing until it merely felt right; fart jokes may not be as scientific as all that. When pressed, though, Brooks happily pulled an answer out of his, uh, ear.