in defense of bathroom humor

What if we remembered our days in the womb?

Do you think we’d reminisce about them? Or would those memories be too universal for comment, like blinking or breathing?

Our initiation into life would seem worthy of some discussion, yet I suspect those memories would be too private, too vulnerable and intimate, to share. More likely we’d joke about them, using humor to relieve our embarrassment. (“Remember how jounced around you’d get whenever your mother got the hiccups?”)

Bathroom humor seems to work the same way, letting us acknowledge things about our bodies that embarrass us.

It’s a bit odd that burping, farting, peeing and pooping make us squeamish. They’re completely natural processes, which is why no infant finds them amusing. Yet as we grow out of infancy we become aware of social etiquette. “Close the bathroom door,” we’re told; “Say ‘excuse me.’” The adult world finds everyday biology unattractive; children, caught between nature and adult discomfort, find it amusing. What results is bathroom humor, the natural response to arbitrary social mores.

And who’s to say belches aren’t amusing? They sure sound weird. Farts sure smell gross. Pee and poop are especially peculiar, coming out of the same bodies we spend so much time keeping clean and healthy.

It’s a tension charged with irony: we are dignified individuals, informed citizens of a sophisticated 21st-Century civilization, and we also squeeze solid brown goo out of our butts. (And not just once – habitually!)

So why not take ourselves a little less seriously? We craft skyscrapers and suspension bridges, medicines and microchips. We investigate the vast reaches of the cosmos and the minute operations of the atomic nucleus. And we make abrupt noises by expelling stomach gases through our vocal chords. What’s not funny about that?

I rather suspect that when we get to heaven and look back on life, we’ll get a chuckle reminiscing about our physical bodies. I can just hear the conversations: “Remember when you had to poop? It was so messy you had to wipe yourself off with tissue …”

We are minds, and we are bodies. Enjoy the mystery, and laugh.