We were robbed of a fart scene in "Barbie"!!!

I knew something was missing. But there seems to be a good reason for it.

I know that I just wrote you an email about Barbie, but something came to my attention hours after I sent it, and I simply must address this breaking news. If you came here for sports? Well, buckle up, sweetheart, because Barbie IS sports.

When we left the theater after seeing Barbie, my fiancé Tyler and I were pretty stunned. Holy shit, we were saying to each other, was that a perfect movie? Perfect for what it was, at least — a movie about the most divisive doll in history, a movie that had to walk the tightrope of “feminism is good” without being preachy or seeming like a special presentation at The Wing in 2017, a movie rooted firmly in capitalism whose ultimate message was about what it means to be human.

Director/writer Greta Gerwig, producer/star Margot Robbie, and everyone who worked on this film nailed it, as I said yesterday. But what I didn’t say yesterday is that every joke was the funniest version of itself. Do you know how rare that is? To leave a movie and be like, wow, every syllable of those bits was doing an equal amount of work? For more on this, please read Hunter Harris on that one line that Issa Rae says (also, in general, read anything Hunter writes).

It’s even rarer that I don’t immediately rip into a film after I see it by listing all the ways it could have been better (I know, I’m super fun to watch stuff with). After I saw the train wreck that was Don’t Worry Darling, I was so angry at its dumb-ass plot and idiotic script that I went home and rewrote the narrative arc in my notes app. “Should I tweet this?” I asked Tyler. “Absolutely not,” he said. Which is why you should always try to marry someone who saves you from yourself, especially if you’re active on social media.

As we strolled home from the Cobble Hill Theater (my favorite movie theater after The Strand in Rockland, Maine), I suddenly realized that there was one thing that could have improved Barbie: fart jokes.

We didn’t get a single fart joke!

NO FARTS!?

Look, call me juvenile, but I really think farts are the funniest things that exist. A good fart joke, or a fart released at an inopportune time? Nothing makes me laugh harder. Nothing! Farts are objectively hilarious. They’re an undignified sound — a quack or a squeak or a doink or a trumpet or a crescendo or a sonic boom, etc. — that comes out of your butt and also smells bad. Literally find me something funnier. You can’t.

And, in a movie about how “women are people, too, not just anatomically incorrect dolls” (reductive, but whatever), what better way to prove that point than with a fart joke or two?

Well, it turns out that Gerwig and her editor/long-time collaborator Nick Houy had one in there. And it was not just a fart joke or two, it was a FART OPERA. In a great interview with IndieWire, the two talked about how they have tried to get fart jokes into the last three movies they’ve made together: Lady Bird, Little Women, and now Barbie. But the timing has never been right, so they’ve had to murder their fart darlings.

I respect this. Nothing is less funny than something that’s trying too hard, and no joke is worth the expense of proper pacing. In the interview, Gerwig says she and Houy are “both big George Saunders fans. And we talked about his Russian short fiction book because, to me, it was one of the best books about filmmaking without being a book about filmmaking. He says, you have to keep your reader in the sidecar with you. As you’re writing and editing, you keep checking on them. Is the reader still in the sidecar or did I lose the reader on a turn?”

First of all, no one does pacing quite like the Russians. Read Tolstoy’s short stories if you want to be punched in the stomach, emotionally (yes, I read, sorry for partying).

Secondly, the reason Barbie was so great is that Gerwig and Houy really kept things moving. There was no fat on the bone except for when we were purposely served a richly marbled piece of Wagyu in the form of a musical number or fake battle sequence. Every choice seemed made with the intention of keeping everyone firmly buckled into that sidecar, and if a fart opera would have tossed us out for even a second, I can respect the choice to get rid of it.

But wow. I’d like to see it. It would be a real shame if someone at Warner Brothers didn’t leak that scene.

Please, for the love of farts, someone leak the fart opera.