MythBusters: Scents And Sensibility

Walking into the restaurant on Manhattan's 7th Avenue, a block away from the Ed Sullivan Theater where my companions were to appear on Letterman the next day, some guy recognized Jamie and Adam. "Are you here to solve the myth of the pizza sauce?" he cracked. Jamie and Adam smiled. The man made a joke about blowing somthing up. Jamie and Adam walked into the restaurant, their smiles no longer as genuine.

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are the stars of MythBusters [2], Discovery Channel's hit show dedicated to uncovering the science behind urban myths. For three seasons Jamie and Adam have devotedly applied the scientific method to bust dozens of widely held myths. But to the guy at the door and fans all over the world, they're known as the guys who love to blow things up. That's not how they want to be known, but that seems to be what gets butts onto couches, so that's how Discovery markets them. Discovery manages the MythBusters image carefully, and the image of two trigger-happy gung-ho scientists seems to be the one they've latched on to.

And that image, as Discovery has it, is incongruous with fecal matter.

And yet there I was.

We sat at the table for the interview that wasn't supposed to happen -- myself, Jamie, Adam, Peter, MythBusters' Executive Producer; Eric,

Dave and Jamie listen intently.

their Associate Producer; and my lovely wife Jenny. When I had first approached Peter about setting up this interview, he enthusiastically referred me to Discovery's PR representative. She refused to email me. A website dedicate to poo, she told Peter, doesn't jibe with Discovery's carefully crafted family-friendly image.

Spend five minutes with this crew and you can see why Discovery is apprehensive about putting them in the same room with a guy who spends his time contemplating the philosophical ramifications of poop. On the set, they told me, poop jokes regularly flow; Discovery knows this, and probably feared that my presence would be the catalyst that unleashed the true nature of their stars. But Peter felt loyalty to PoopReport -- this site was one of the first to write about the show [3] when they first got started; and Peter didn't forget it. So he scheduled the interview himself. And sure enough, they were bursting with the kind of talk that would make a corporate publicity hack gnaw at her clipboard and mentally begin updating her resume:

"One of Adam's most unsettling experiences on the set involved poop."

"Peter keeps imagining a frying turd on a skillet."

"I once had one lodge across the bowl. I had to pour boiling water on it just to get it down!"

I print these quotes not to piss off Discovery, nor to frighten their advertisers, nor to appease those PoopReporters who are wondering when this article will finally start talking about poop; and certainly not just for shock value. (It shouldn't surprise anyone that a bunch of guys who work long hours together turn to poop jokes to pass the time -- most people would do the same.) No, I mention it instead to underscore the major theme of my forbidden ninety-minute discussion with the MythBusters team: the tensions between creative integrity and the corporate image.

Adam, Jamie, and Peter intend MythBusters to be an entertaining way to educate. Every week Adam and Jamie tackle urban legends, old wives tales, and conventional wisdom, deploying the scientific method to uncover the truth behind the myth. The point of the show is not to blow things up, but rather to apply science to situations in which science is not usually applied. The fact that things do get blown up at the end is the icing; but the one-dimensional positioning of the show causes too many people to overlook the cake.

"Our theory of the show," says Peter, "is the more {science} content you put in, the better. Discovery's theory about the show is spectacle. Each show has to have a stunt, an explosion, and Adam injuring himself." Recognizing this, the team has learned to use the system against itself. "Our technique is to use the way Adam injures himself to get more content in. So we can get the sequence of building something from three seconds to three minutes."

"The blowing stuff up is nearly always just a stunt," says Adam. "The research we've done and the data we've gathered is usually sufficient that we already know what to expect."

"The most interesting thing to us," says Jamie, "is that we're out there

Adam gives my lovely wife the eye. Back off, man!

exploring the world at large in all its various facets."

And indeed they are. One facet was the brown note, the sound frequency rumored to cause uncontrollable defecation (doesn't exist). Another is whether you will get stuck to an airline vacuum toilet if you're sitting on it when it flushes (you won't). Yet another is whether you can get electrocuted by peeing on the subway's third rail (you can't, unless you're peeing from only a foot or two away, in which case your urine will still be a stream instead of a bunch of droplets and you can expect one very charred wee-wee).

People believe urban myths because they make sense of society's unknowns. Many of society's unknowns, though, coincide with society's unmentionables. The constant struggle is to explore these unmentionables on a network with a censorship standard, according to Adam, based on whether one can "turn on the show at any moment during the edit and not be shocked by what I see."

It's that standard that meant viewers never got to see the aforementioned shot of the fake ass in the vacuum-toilet episode. "They felt that this one shot of a point of view from the toilet bowl of a big rubber ass lowering down on the toilet seat was unacceptable," said Adam. "Because if you were switching channels and didn't know what you were seeing -- 'oh my God!'"

Jamie recalls the episode Son of a Gun [4] as another example. The myth they were exploring was a civil war story of a bullet ricocheting off a soldier's tibia, passing through his testicles, and then piercing the womb of a woman 150 yards away, impregnating her. With elements of biology, physics, and history, it was a perfect subject. But how do they illustrate the flight of the bullet when they're not allowed to show testicles? How do they discuss the viability of this method of artificial insemination when they're not allowed to say "sperm"? Discovery asked them to use the phrase "genetic material," which they did, until Jamie couldn't take it any more. "Genetic legacy?? It's SPERM! Any kid in grade school knows that -- helps make babies, y'know!"

That outburst, perhaps because it was grounded firmly in science, survived the edit.

What makes MythBusters click is how Adam and Jamie's skills compliment each other. Jamie is practical, as Peter told me, and Adam is experiential. Jamie thinks. Adam does. To illustrate this, Peter asked Adam to describe "one of his most unsettling experiences" on the set.

"We were doing the porta-potty explosion, and we had to test whether I was one of the 40% of Americans that produce methane in their farts. We were going to use a little amount of my poop in sample jars and test the methane in them. You know, I'm pretty regular, so right about 7:30 before I'm heading into work, I'm ready for my constitutional. The wife is giggling as she hands me a big Ziplock baggie, and I go into the bathroom and then there's five to six solid minutes of just trying to figure out the mechanics of how to poo in this bag." And to the chagrin of passing waiters and waitresses probably wishing that these celebrities would throw phones or punch photographers like Russell Crowe or Sean Penn instead of loudly talking about poop in the middle of the lunch hour, Adam described his thought process, and how he eventually settled upon a "kind of gymnastic squat" to get his poop into the bag.

"Of course," replied Jamie, "the mechanical approach you wouldn't have thought about would be to just get some Saran Wrap and put it on the floor and do it like you would in the woods. Pick that up and put it in the bag."

It's that kind of relationship -- one problem, multiple perspectives -- that helps the team

Peter and Adam peruse The Journal of Ass Production [5].

investigate their myths. And it frustrates them equally to see their creativity distilled down into montages of explosions for their promos; or to be on Letterman not to talk about bringing science to the masses but instead launching Paul Newman a hundred feet above 54th Street in a balloon chair; or to have some yahoo outside the restaurant recognize them not for the scientists and educators they are but for the pyromaniacs Discovery makes them out to be.

The ideal myth, Adam says, is "both shocking and illuminating." Maybe that's why Peter was so keen to interview with this purveyor of brown journalism -- because he could see this site takes the same approach. If shock was all we PoopReporters were after, then stark pictures of glistening ass batter would illustrate every story; but this site's aim is to analyze the social structure that makes us laugh at people who crap themselves while we're laughing at people who crap themselves. So if MythBusters were to take this site's suggestion and investigate whether toilet paper actually works (or whether wiping just smears an invisible layer of fecal mater on your taint), the end result would be both hilarious and enlightening: because it would explore the science behind something few of us have ever thought to analyze. Because it would open our eyes to the world we think we know. And because it would probably multiply bidet sales a hundred times once people learned the science debunking the myth.

Ultimately the media vehicles Discovery's publicity people love so much -- the Lettermans and the Regises of the world -- are the ones that advance science the least; while this interview here on PoopReport.com (your #1 source for your #2 business! Buy a t-shirt! [6]) is intended to be one of the more thoughtful the guys have ever had published.

So it's in the name of science that I close with this final quote from Adam: "We'd like to do the first lighting of a fart on television." Because after saying that, Jenny asked, "If you do that, is there a risk that the fire could go back up your butt?"

To which Peter responded: "That's the classic urban myth." And then he explained the scientific reasoning that proves lighting your fart creates absolutely no risk of a methane explosion in your colon. Myth busted.