I don’t like to mention it, but… frankly, I’m the only one, these days.
Talking about such matters used to be unthinkable – the epitome of Things That Were Just Not Done in polite society. Every family had their own private word for it to avoid flushes of embarrassment when our tiny tots let it slip out in front of visitors. Even the room where it happened frequently had a euphemistic name: the little girls’ room, the smallest room, etc.
But since the 1970s, humour seems to have gone down the pan. The floodgates opened and the brown tide oozed in. The unmentionable has become the almost-unavoidable.
Comedians can’t get through a five-minute routine without joking about it, and it’s become the bog standard subject for every TV sitcom. Every comedy film has the obligatory poop scene – there are even several websites dedicated to categorising and reviewing them!
Mr Hanky the Christmas Poo from South Park was followed by a row of skidmarks as other cartoon series rushed to join this revolting trend. There are over a million websites of poems about it! Even children’s books haven’t escaped. The tasteless-but-funny Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas caught with his trousers down was fair enough, but now we have “Where’s the Poop?” featuring lift-the-flaps to find where jungle animals have left their deposits. On Amazon alone there are over 1000 books on the subject.
Now we seem to have reached the absolute… well… bottom. A recent TV programme discussed the correct position for defecation, with an attractive pictorial chart of stool types and what each meant about the person’s health. Per-lease.
We’re even selling it. Hysterical ‘gift ideas’ for the festive season feature Reindeer Poop (chocolate raisins), Snowman Poop (mini marshmallows) etc. But that’s not all – far from it.
There’s now a company that will send elephant poop, gorilla poop etc through the mail as “the ultimate gag gift” for all occasions – they even suggest it would be a terrific idea to send a gallon of cow dung to “the teacher who gave your son/daughter a D”. Un-bloody-believable. What kind of person would even think that funny, let alone pay $35 to do it? If their child has inherited their intelligence level, they’d be lucky to achieve a grade D in the first place.
I have only two things to say about this subject:
Firstly, It’s. Been. Done. Surely every possible joke, from the genuinely-hilarious to the mildly-smirksome, has been squeezed out of the topic by now?
Number 2 (sorry!) Life has a shimmering variety of other experiences to offer. This one stinks. Can’t we talk about something else now?
Seriously – let’s cut the crap.