How to Prank People With Fart Sounds and Not Blow It

Quick backstory. When I was in 8th grade, Ryan Mitchell hid a fart machine under Mrs. Patterson's desk chair before first period. The kind with the remote, you've seen them. He triggered it three times during attendance and each time she stood up and looked around like she'd heard a ghost. By the third one she sent Kyle Berger to the office. Kyle Berger had nothing to do with it. Kyle just looked guilty. Ryan Mitchell got away clean. I think about this a lot. There's actual skill involved in making a fart prank land. People don't talk about that. They treat it like the sound does all the work. It doesn't. The sound is almost secondary. What matters is setup, timing, and keeping your face normal — and Ryan had all three. So here's what I know from years of running these. --- **You have to control the moment before the sound** This is the thing. The gap. Before you trigger anything, you need a few seconds of quiet. Not dead silence necessarily — a room of people talking quietly works — but that ambient hum where nothing in particular is happening. Then the sound comes in, and everybody's brain instantly snaps to it because there was nothing else to snap to. If there's already noise — a TV on, music, a bunch of overlapping conversations — you're throwing the sound into a wall. It might not even register. Or it registers for one person and nobody else hears it, and that person just looks confused, and now you have a confused person and nothing else. I try to find the moment right after someone says something ordinary and there's a brief natural pause before anyone responds. "So I think we're doing the barbecue Saturday." Then quiet. That's when I play it. Works consistently. The contrast between the mundane sentence and what follows is doing a lot. The [soundboard on this site](/) has the full range of options. For this kind of quiet-gap timing play, pick something in the two-second range. Anything much longer and people hear it building and they're already prepared for the impact and it's less funny. Short, dense, textured. That's your indoor quiet-room weapon. --- **Phone calls are a massively underrated format for this** Okay here is the thing about pranking someone over the phone. When the sound happens and you're in the same room, they look at you. Immediately. The social pressure to address it is instant and unavoidable. But on a call, they heard something. And they don't know what. And they have to decide: do I say something about that? And in my experience — I've done this probably fifteen times now, tracking results in a weird way because that's who I am — about 80% of people won't bring it up. They let it go. They keep talking. And for the rest of the call they're carrying this thing around, this unaddressed weird moment, and you can hear it in how they talk. Slightly off. A little distracted. That is funnier to me than the live reaction. The slow-burn unacknowledged fart phone call. The delayed uncomfortable processing. Beautiful format. Mechanics are simple: soundboard open on laptop, call on phone, play the sound through laptop speaker and hold the phone close. Not complicated. Just don't use Bluetooth to the phone speaker because the lag is bad. You need it to happen when you push play. --- **The pre-placed speaker is the peak of the form** My cousin Danny did this at Thanksgiving once. Small speaker inside the couch cushion. Connected to his phone via Bluetooth. He triggered it every time someone sat down or stood up. Just -- bloop. Wet bubble sound. Coming from the couch itself. My aunt apologized for the couch. To my grandmother. "I don't know what's wrong with it, I'm so sorry." She thought the cushions were doing something. She pushed on them a little. Danny looked mildly puzzled. Like the rest of us. He had been sitting there the whole time. This works so well because it's not YOU doing anything. You're just present. The couch is the suspect. The furniture is the suspect. And you get to watch people try to reason through an impossible situation. Nobody's sitting there thinking "Danny connected a Bluetooth speaker to the couch cushion before dinner." Nobody's brain goes there. A small Bluetooth speaker — honestly any cheap one works, I've used a 12 dollar one I got on Amazon, some brand I've never heard of before or since — will fit inside most couch cushions, in a bag under a table, or under a car seat. All good venues. The [soundboard](/) works from your phone while connected so you're just holding your phone like a normal person waiting for the right moment. --- **The sounds aren't all interchangeable, which matters** So if you haven't been to the soundboard much, worth knowing that the different sounds have different use cases. Or I've developed opinions about it. Same thing. Short tight pops are for places where ambient noise is low and you need the sound to cut in fast without warning. Library. Waiting room. That kind of thing. The short ones hit before anyone can anticipate them. Longer wet sounds are for outdoor situations mostly because indoors they start to become a spectacle. Too long and people don't just react — they wait to see how long it goes, and then they're impressed instead of just reacting, and the energy is different. Outside in a park, long and rumbly works great because it carries through open space. The bubbly wet ones in the middle are my go-to for versatility. They read as accidental. They have texture that says "this was real." Clean dry sounds are weirdly suspicious — they sound produced, clinical almost. If you want something that makes people genuinely believe something happened rather than immediately suspecting audio playback, pick something with some wetness. Also ties into why [bathtub farts sound so different](/blog/bathtub-fart-acoustics) — the water creates texture and complexity that the human ear reads as physical and real. Check the [full sound library](/sounds) if you want to see what you're working with. --- **Ways this falls apart** You're smiling before you do it. This is the only thing that truly matters for live pranks and Ryan Mitchell had it at 13, which means some people just have it and some people don't. If your face gives you away, it's over. They're looking at you when it plays. The reaction is laughing at your anticipation face, not the sound. Nothing. You do it twice. Or three times. Once is a mystery. Twice and someone's already looking around for the source. The surprise is completely gone. One trigger per setting, then you're done, you move on, you've banked the moment. The crowd is wrong. I won't do any of this around people who would genuinely not find it funny. That's just reading the room. People who laugh at their own farts are good targets. People who act like bodily functions don't happen and look pained when the subject comes up: these people will not enjoy this. Don't engage. --- **Questions I've gotten** *Does the prank work over video calls?* Yes, actually really well. Your camera is on but the sound is coming from... somewhere. They can see you're not reacting. So it must not have been you. Who was it? Nobody knows. *What if they immediately say something about it on the phone call?* You say "what? I didn't hear anything" and sound slightly confused. Not defensive. Confused. Let them explain what they think they heard. This is the best possible outcome because now they're describing a fart to you on the phone. *Should you do this to your boss?* That's really a personal risk tolerance question. --- The whole point of [this soundboard](/) is that you've got the tools. The sounds are there. The rest is just knowing when and where and keeping your face totally neutral. That last part is all practice. Ryan Mitchell didn't get there overnight.

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