This is so neat! Skunk smell is such an iconic, well known, horrendous animal smell in North America. I've never considered someone would not know what it smells like!

Closer to rotten egg than fish but not quite. It's caused by sulfur compounds similar to those in weed and bad beer as suggested (or beer that's bottled in clear or green glass and left in the sun - brown and cobalt glass block the UV that causes the compounds to form) but there's a wider "pallette" of odors in much higher concentration.