Said Absalon, all set to make a launch,
"Speak, pretty bird, I know not where thou art!"
This Nicholas at once let fly a fart
As loud as if it were a thunder-clap.
He was near blinded by the blast, poor chap ...
-- Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Miller's Tale"
Much of my family were shocked two Christmases ago when my then 15-year-old nephew presented me and my husband with a tree ornament of Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, which he'd made -- beautifully -- out of polymer clay. Mr. Hankey, one of the most infamous characters of "South Park," is, to put it plainly, a talking turd in a Santa hat. The Mr. Hankey episode of "South Park" had aired a few weeks before the presentation of this illustrious and well-loved gift, and my nephew knew that my husband and I had laughed ourselves silly at the episode. It was scheduled to air again that night, Christmas Eve (oh holy night!), and so my husband and a gaggle of assorted nieces and nephews, ages 11 to 20, scrambled off to the family room to catch it.
Almost everyone had a comfy spot in front of the set when my husband was apprehended by one of my sisters -- busted! -- who informed him, with schoolmarm sobriety, that he was supposed to be setting a good example. The implication was that he should be sitting quietly with the other grownups, not leading the youth of America down the road to ruin, a highway to hell littered with fart jokes and talking turds.
"Audiences hiss the sight of blood now, as if they didn't have it in their own bodies," Pauline Kael wrote in her essay "Fear of Movies." These days, you could say the same thing about poop. Toilet humor -- the kind you get in current movies like "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" and "Big Daddy," and earlier pictures like "Dumb & Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary" -- has become the enemy of cultural standard bearers everywhere.
But as any 5-year-old can tell you, bodily functions are funny. They surprise you at inconvenient times. They can embarrass you. The fact that we're all subject to them is a great leveller -- which is one reason, maybe, that moviegoers who fancy themselves enlightened don't want to take the bait: They want every joke hung on an intelligent reference, something that will reaffirm their slightly more elevated place in the cosmos.
Yet one of the great pleasures of the movies is that they can affect us on so many different levels, no matter how many graduate degrees we have (or haven't) earned. Toilet humor is usually pegged as lowest-common-denominator humor, but part of the reason it may make people uncomfortable is that it speaks to all kinds of strange feelings about ourselves and our bodies that we've buried deep.
Any parent who's potty-trained a child can probably understand this: Suddenly, all those things you learned long ago not to talk about in polite company become things you have to discuss openly with your child, without making a big deal out of them. Toilet humor -- when it's done well -- is a kind of punk act that frees us now and then from the constraints we've all faced since the day we abandoned training pants. It's just another way to make a big deal out of things -- everyday things -- that society tells us we shouldn't. That notion of nose-thumbing at "polite company" is what gives good toilet humor its kick.
The distinction that has to be made, though, is that not all toilet humor is created equal. There's something distressing about people who make judgments about a specific genre -- any genre -- without exercising their own critical sensibilities. Dismissing all toilet humor means making the assumption that all fart, poo and pee jokes are created equal -- that there can never be any skill or inventiveness behind them, and that intelligent people can never, or should never, enjoy them. No one has to find all toilet humor funny -- there are plenty of times when it's simply inane -- but sharp directors and writers can make all the difference. When the Farrelly brothers' "Dumb & Dumber" was released, in 1994, the name alone became a lightning rod for all that was allegedly wrong with contemporary culture. Intelligent, educated adults, in print, on television and at dinner-party conversations everywhere, waved the title around like a flag, an example of how far we'd fallen, of how "quality" movies no longer mattered to a mass audience. Western civilization was about to end, and not with a bang or a whimper but a slow, deadly pffffffft.
What struck me at the time was not that people were excoriating "Dumb & Dumber," but that very few of those who did so had actually seen it. (Since then, it seems to have found its proper, appreciative audience on video.) The title, they thought, told them just about everything. They'd heard it was a jumble of fart, piss and poop jokes, the province of 8-year-olds and frat boys -- in other words, the hoi polloi -- not thinking adults.
Things haven't changed much since. A recent GQ article by Andrew Corsello, lamenting the popularity of "moronic" humor (and written in a pompously mannered style that strains to keep the "gentleman" in the quarterly) even gives the genre a suitably highfalutin name: "la commedia della moronica." Another article, in Entertainment Weekly, before giving evidence of what it saw as a Hollywood toilet-humor trend, warned readers meekly that "Much of it is in the form of bodily fluids, so read no further if you're weak of stomach."
Being "weak of stomach" is a good enough reason for an individual to decide not to see a movie. But you can't base an argument that the culture's going to hell in a handbasket on mere queasiness, or even on vague feelings of being "offended." I found "Dumb & Dumber" to be one of the funniest movies of that year, and not because I unequivocally love any movie that's loaded with gross-outs. It takes a certain amount of ingenuity to come up with the number of fart, poo and pee jokes that keep "Dumb & Dumber" rolling, and to keep them coming, paced properly, so that the audience gets carried away with the nuttiness of them instead of just numbed by them.
You can't defend "Dumb & Dumber" as a subtle movie -- it isn't. But the Farrellys make most of their jokes with sound effects and lingering, unbroken shots that underscore the silliness of certain situations, or the embarrassment the characters feel -- as when Jeff Daniels, after downing a massive dose of laxative, finds relief on his love interest's (broken) toilet. He sits there for an uncommonly long time; the symphony of sounds around him are a report on his progress. It's a nightmare vision that makes you groan at least partly out of empathy -- who ever wants to be the one to mess up the guest bathroom?
Some of the best toilet-humor jokes are actually implied sight gags -- for example, the sight of Mike Myers in "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" taking a never-ending pee or the way, in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," Heather Graham's Felicity Shagwell appears to be pulling a strange array of items (a frying pan, a flashlight, a live rat) out of Austin's behind. The scene takes place in a camping tent, backlit so you see only silhouettes; the effect reminds me of some "naughty" 18th century European silhouettes I once saw reproduced on a series of postcards -- a reminder that the tradition of toilet humor goes back further, even, than Mel Brooks. (Chaucer was getting a charge out of it in the 14th century.)
When Entertainment Weekly asked Myers "if there was anything too stupid or gross to include" in "The Spy Who Shagged Me," he replied, "No. The notion of intelligent vs. unintelligent comedy is irrelevant to me. It's not too stupid as long as it's funny." Of course, that's easy for him to say. Toilet humor, like every other kind of humor, is subjective: Even among people with a high tolerance for toilet gags, the same ones aren't going to get all of us all the time. Every moviegoer, even those who claim they just want to pay their $9 and be entertained, has a critical sensibility. Most of the "Fat Bastard" toilet jokes in "The Spy Who Shagged Me" did nothing for me. Although it didn't make me want to flee the theater, Myers' mistaking a beakerful of liquid stool sample for coffee seemed to me the jerkiest kind of ca-ca joke. But the sequence did make me think about what separates a good doo-doo joke from a bad one. I realized that when it comes to toilet humor, even I have my particular brand of snobbery: just showing the stuff sometimes seems too cheap, too easy. There are so many opportunities for goofy sex and time-warp jokes in "The Spy Who Shagged Me" that I found myself more critical than usual of the throwaway toilet humor.
And I found myself completely unmoved by the toilet humor in Adam Sandler's "Big Daddy." I don't have the aversion to Adam Sandler that so many people do -- I found him rather appealing, if innocuous, in "The Wedding Singer," and I've howled at the ludicrous simplicity of some of his "Saturday Night Live" sketches. But I think Sandler is headed in too many wrong directions at once: He wants to keep the frat-boy audience sewn up, but he also wants their girlfriends to see him as a lovable, caring guy. That kind of eagerness to please is death for a comic; you have to be willing to alienate at least some of the people some of the time. I had no problem with Sandler teaching his 5-year-old buddy to pee against a wall in "Big Daddy" (it was a fancy restaurant whose maitre d' refused to let the little guy use the bathroom, earning "Big Daddy" a bonus of half a point for social commentary, however lame). And I felt a little weary after I saw the same routine the third time, but still not offended. What did offend me was the loutish grab that "Big Daddy" made for my heartstrings -- it culminates in a soppy courtroom custody hearing that involves a father and son pouring out their previously pent-up feelings. And the emotional cheapness of that I absolutely could not abide.
It may sound strange, but I think there's almost a delicacy to the best kind of toilet humor: The most obvious joke is less likely to work its nasty magic than a slightly more subtle one (Jim Carrey, in "Dumb & Dumber," trapped in a van and desperately peeing into a succession of empty beer bottles -- a dozen, it looked like -- because there's nowhere else for him to go). There's a language that goes along with toilet humor in the movies, just as there's a language that goes with love stories or action pictures. Some of it will speak to you, and some of it, no matter how hard it tries -- or maybe precisely because it tries so hard -- just won't.
But then, what do you do with a movie like Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," a movie designed to push every possible button? "Bigger, Longer & Uncut" is one of the most unsubtle movies I've seen in years -- and yet I laughed almost the whole way through, from the film-within-the-film featuring the feeble fart jokes of Terrance and Philip (whose very crudeness and shamelessness were exactly what made them so funny) to the absurdity of Saddam Hussein waving his penis around, like a madman relic of the old Times Square. And it contains more foul language than Saddam can shake his stick at (including a big musical number called "Uncle Fucka").
From start to finish, "Bigger, Longer & Uncut" was designed to offend, to leave jaws hanging open in awe ("Did I really just see that?"), and it succeeds. That alone is testament to Parker and Stone's ingenuity, considering that the "South Park" TV show (starting with its legendary precursor, a crudely made videotape that showed Santa and Jesus Christ duking it out, literally, for the spirit of Christmas, insulting nearly every religious group on the planet along the way) seemed to have gone as far as possible into the wild, wild West of fart, poo and projectile-vomiting jokes.
In an early sequence, South Park kids Cartman, Kyle, Kenny and Stan sneak into an R-rated movie and emerge with fountains of obscenities, all picked up from the film, streaming from their mouths -- a hymn to freedom coming straight from the id. When they go back to meet the rest of their schoolmates, the stream of obscenities rushes even more freely, and their friends, duly impressed, run off to see the movie for themselves. Reprimanded by a shocked teacher, Cartman exclaims, "I can't help myself, that movie has warped my fragile little mind."
"South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" has its flaws -- all that nonstop
visual stimulation and naughtiness-
I could tell from eavesdropping on their conversation before the movie that this dad was anxious to raise his kid as a responsible, thinking individual: He talked to him as if he were an adult, asking him questions about commercials he'd seen on television and answering -- with a degree of honesty and real thought -- his son's parrying questions on the same subject. When the lights went down, and the movie started, I heard both father and son laughing at the jokes (though they didn't laugh at all the same ones). From those two seats next to me, I felt a sense of familial well-being that I've yet to feel at any Disney movie -- at any of those "family" movies where grown-ups and children are supposed to bond. Not only did Dad trust that his son would know what to make of that movie; he knew what to make of it himself. It was the kind of thing that gives you faith in the intelligence and open-mindedness of adult moviegoers -- an acknowledgment that the mere threat of toilet humor shouldn't be enough to keep any thinking person away from the movies.
Even if they've shown up on the pretense of having to take their kids.
