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-- 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.

Next page | Who wants to be the one to mess up the guest bathroom?