Toilet Humour

Is it just me, or have TV commercials really crossed a line in terms of good taste when it comes to certain products?  Things like toilet paper, for instance - we all know what it is for, do we really need ads involving people actually sitting on the crapper?  OK, I know that they've been heading this way for many years now, but it just feels as if they are getting worse.  It isn't just toilet paper, it is bodily functions generally.  I mean, a while ago I had the TV on in the background when, suddenly, I've got someone in my living room bellowing out 'Stubborn stool?' before going on to try and sell me a stool softening product in between shots of sufferers' straining faces as they try to painfully pass a particularly recalcitrant turd.  I was eating, for God's sake!  But, worse than interrupting my meal with thoughts of chronic constipation, the ad was screening in the middle of an episode of The Love Boat, (Pluto has a channel that shows it on a loop - it is one of my 'go to' places for passive, inoffensive, background TV viewing) - a TV show from that Golden Era of seventies and eighties US TV when nobody had a toilet.  Not in their workplace, not in their home, certainly not public ones on the street.  Trust me, that entire ship in The Love Boat doesn't have a single toilet lurking anywhere amongst its hundreds of cabins.  Leaving the question of where people actually went back then?  Maybe in The Love Boat, they just crapped over the side.  Perhaps that's why Starsky and Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard spent so much time roaring around at high speed in their cars:  they were desperately seeking a secluded place to take a dump.  I know that there's long been a theory that in Star Trek, Kirk, Spock et al just used to beam down to random planets they were passing to relieve themselves.  Doubtless causing all manner of diplomatic incidents with Klingons.

The alternative, of course, is that back then people on US TV simply didn't have normal bodily functions.  After all, not only do they not have toilets and apparently never take a dump or a piss, they never seem to fart either.  Ever seen Captain Stubing on The Love Boat suddenly excuse himself from a conference on the bridge, stick his arse out the door on the port side and let rip in the direction of the bridge wing?  Of course not because, like everyone else on seventies/eighties TV he simply doesn't break wind.  By contrast, on UK TV in the seventies and eighties, toilets were very much in evidence.  After all, we have a whole system of humour based around bodily functions, which we find hilarious.  But toilets, for some reason, are also considered hilarious in their own right by us Brits.  Especially when they aren't being used for their correct purpose: characters flushing unlikely objects, intentionally or by accident, down toilet bowls is a staple for seventies sitcoms.  Blocking a toilet in this way, causing it to overflow, flooding the house, was always a sure way of guaranteeing big belly laughs.  Even better was when somebody stuck their foot, or even better, their head, down a toilet - there was a whole episode of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em devoted to Frank Spencer suffering such mishaps with his brother-in-law's toilet.  Similarly, I recall there being a whole episode of On The Buses devoted to Stan's attempts to install a new toilet in his mother's house and another, if I remember rightly, involving goldfish getting flushed down the pan.  This obsession with the comic potential of toilets wasn't just confined to British TV: the 'Carry On' series had an entire movie - Carry On at Your Convenience - devoted to the subject, for instance, while the rest of the series was permeated with toilet humour.  Even pop stars recognised the comic value of the toilet - why else do you think that Keith Moon kept blowing them up?

Now, you'd think that having grown up immersed in toilet humour, TV ads like the 'Stubborn Stool' one, wouldn't bother me at all.   But that's the point - that this humour quite literally focused on the toilet itself, not the functions it was meant to serve.  Sure, we had plenty of fart jokes and gags about people pissing or shitting themselves in embarrassing situations, but they were never explicit as to the mechanics, so to speak, of the functions involved.  The sort of TV ads I see now take us to a level of specific detail we really don't need to know: far too much information, as they say.  Besides, when it comes to those stubborn stools, the answer is to drink more water.  Really, it is, more often than not, down to a lack of proper hydration.  Believe me, having been forced to drink large volumes of water for the sake of my kidneys for the past few years, I can honestly say that it isn't a problem I have the misfortune to experience any more.