Published in The Kansan City Kansan June 25, 1999, my weekly column focused on potty references in a variety of films and TV programs up to that time.
By Steve Crum
Flash! Let’s rephrase that: Flush! It is a dirty job, but someone has to write about it. Even though most decent, clean cut moviegoers tend not to discuss what goes on behind the closed bathroom door in our homes, moviemakers increasingly are setting up widescreen cameras focused on toilet bowls. It is a trend, particularly in comedies, that addresses the basest of adolescent humor.
In the past five years, exemplified in Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me, potty jokes have been written into screenplays with double-ply consistency. Why? They get laughs—huge laughs—from a vast number of ticket buyers.
No surprise that the current No. 1 movie (no potty pun intended), Austin Powers, is laced with bathroom one-liners and sequences. This is not saying that Austin’s appeal is totally john jokes; there are also plenty of sexual innuendo bits and parodies to round out the film. But Le Toilet is a definite co-star.
Movies never used to acknowledge that a toilet even existed. While Marilyn Monroe catches her toe in the bathtub faucet in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch, try to locate a toilet bowl in the scene. (Of course, why would I be looking at anything but Monroe?) That goes for the dozens of bubble bath scenes in movies since silent film days.
Some low/highlights in the media history of bathroom humor:
•I LOVE LUCY—The legendary 1950s sitcom not only never acknowledges a bathroom in the Ricardos’ apartment. Not only that, but most of the time had the couple in separate beds.
•JACK PAAR—On Feb. 11, 1960, the emotional Tonight Show host left the show while on air after NBC censors snipped his “water closet” joke from his previous day’s opening monologue taping. The word itself, British slang for bathroom, was deemed offensive.
•PSYCHO (1960)—The famous shower scene does include a toilet. However, director Alfred Hitchcock never really focuses on the bowl even when a torn up note is later retrieved from inside the bowl.
•ALL IN THE FAMILY—A breakthrough in restroom humor occurred in the early 1970s. For the first time on TV, the sound of a flushing toilet was heard, and only heard, as Archie Bunker pulled the handle upstairs and out of sight.
•FUN WITH DICK AND JANE—1977 caper comedy with Jane Fonda and George Segal includes a heretofore no-no sequence. While talking to her husband, played by Segal, Fonda unabashedly walks into the bathroom, drops her pants, and sits on the toilet. The camera stays on her in medium close-up throughout, although never graphically. She never misses a beat talking to Segal, who stands opposite her as they continue their conversation.
•CLINT EASTWOOD—How many westerns and good ol’ boy flicks did he make that included a sequence where some redneck no-good turns up beaten and passed out with his head in some bar’s toilet?
•DANNY GLOVER—It was perhaps the funniest scene in the Lethal Weapon series: Glover sitting on a rigged-to-explode toilet and unable to move. Mel Gibson, of course, saves the day. The year was 1989, and Lethal Weapon 2 featured dynamite potty humor—literally.
•THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996)—The most memorable sequences in Eddie Murphy’s film are the ones where his family sits around the dining room table, taking turns passing gas. Envision Mickey Rooney’s Hardy Family getting away with that. On second thought, don’t.
•THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY (1998)—Blame the directing Farrelly Brothers for lacing this hit with an abundance of once unmentionable laughs. Note Ben Stiller’s getting caught in his zipper during a urinating scene, and his bathroom masturbating scene, among others. Might as well give the Farrellys credit for potty jokes in their other hits too: Kingpin and Dumb and Dumber. Call them the Lewis and Clark of the Hollywood Potty Trail. 
•BIG DADDY—Opening today at a theatre outside of Wyandotte County is this Adam Sandler vehicle in which previews show him and a 6 year-old co-star publicly urinating (backs to camera) on the side of a building. Pure comic genius.
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Where is Hollywood aiming with all this? Last week’s premiere of Comedy Central’s The Man Show featured the two hosts blowing up dog feces with a large firecracker on camera. They were covered in the stuff, and the studio audience roared in delight.
Still don’t see the trend? It was recently announced that Mr. Whipple, the toilet paper-squeezing grocer, is returning to commercials.
That really tears it.