Toilet humour or scatological humour is a type of off-colour humour dealing with defecation, urination, flatulence, vomiting and other presumably disgusting bodily functions. Public reference to bodily functions is taboo in many cultures. This genre also sees substantial crossover with sexual humour, such as penis jokes.
Toilet humor is most popular among children and teenagers, is often seen as a rejection of taboos, and is a part of modern culture.[1]
Exploitation
Many artists have made their names exploiting toilet humour:
- Eddie Shit's entire act was based on toilet humour interpretations of popular songs, including 'Pohemian Crapsody' and 'Space Jobbity'.
- The internationally popular Canadian children's sketch-comedy television show You Can't Do That On Television (1979-1990) made heavy use of bathroom and gross-out humour, particularly through the show's iconic "green slime," Barth (the hamburger chef, played by Les Lye, whose burgers contained everything but fresh beef), and frequent gags related to flatulence and excrement, especially in the final two years of the series.
- Urinetown, the Broadway musical.
- Some of the lyrical content of avant-garde rock musician Frank Zappa's songs revolved around toilet humour, for example, "Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow" (from the album Apostrophe).
- The Japanese manga Enomoto: New Elements that Shake the World has been praised as a series of "innovative comics that are almost entirely concerned with bodily functions."[2]
- A first-person shooter video game called HURL uses much potty humor, but no violence, in order that the game be considered suitable for children.
- Dr. Slump, a manga from Akira Toriyama (the creator of Dragon Ball), also had a strong scatological bent.
- The Private Eye comic strip Barry McKenzie written by Barry Humphries and drawn by Nicholas Garland are a treasure trove of chundering, parking the tiger, splashing the boots, draining the dragon, and beating the JBoxer' with much of the allegedly Australian slang created by Humphries himself.
- Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, translated as King Turd, opens with the line "Merdre!" (a corruption of the French merde, translated by Barbara Wright as "shitter") and is filled with scatological humour. Though Jarry was only 14 years old when he began it as a spoof of one of his teachers, it is now regarded as one of the first examples of the Theatre of the Absurd.
- It is a commonly used convention in movies directed by the Farrelly Brothers. For example, their movie Dumb and Dumber featured a lengthy toilet scene played by actor Jeff Daniels involving a diarrhetic reaction.
- The band Bloodhound Gang's songs and music videos feature numerous toilet humour references.
- The show Drawn Together contains frequent toilet humour scenes. For example, Spanky Ham once ordered a pizza and defecated on it, returning it to the delivery man, saying, "Wait, I didn't order this pizza with sausage".
- Blink 182 is known for their toilet humour, as shown on their live album, The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back).
- Insane Clown Posse, are very acclaimed for their extravegant use of toilet humour and derogatory, and obnoxious use of foul language.
- In the nudie-cartoon magazine series Sex to Sexty, one story is that a kid in a bathroom sings a jingle (from a 70s commercial) "Chewy chewy tootsie roll lasts a long time." His mother yells, "Put that nasty thing back in the toilet!"
- The Austin Powers film series features lots of toilet humor. A character named Fat Bastard is even dedicated to it.
- In Mel Brook's "Blazing Saddles", there is a campfire scene in which everyone, feasting on beans, farts tremendously, and continuously. They ask for more beans, and the trailboss, played by Slim Pickens refuses them, saying: "I'd say you've had enough."
- DreamWorks Animation films
- South Park
- The Ren and Stimpy Show
- Family Guy
- Beavis and Butt-head
- Rocko's Modern Life
- Crayon Shin Chan
- Rugrats
- A 1983 computer game for the TRS-80 Color Computer titled Outhouse by J. Weaver, Jr. distributed by Computer Shack, in which the player controls a flying saucer defending an outhouse from earthlings sticking its toilet paper in their backside and walking out with it.[3]
See also
Miscellaneous media items
References
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