Toilet Humor

Pardon the breach of the topic, but toilet humor has been a fascinating subject for me lately. I suppose this curiosity began when I read an article about scholars who are beginning to inject more of their own autobiography into their academic writing. This has long been considered anathema in formal writing in which the writer becomes invisible for the purpose of concentrating on the work itself. Of course, this avoidance of personal detail was also linked for a long while with notions of objectivity: one can escape from his or her own experience, presuppositions and commitments in order to communicate truths that become true for all persons regardless of their experience, it was thought. What many have realized somewhat recently (amongst our postmodern condition), however, is that we can never truly escape these things, so any attempt to do so will simply distort our own observations to the extent that we fail to appreciate how we just cannot escape from our subjectivity. In any case, the interesting aspect of these autobiographical trends that I seized on is how these personal disclosures almost always seem to be self-deprecating.

To highlight one curious tendency I noticed among these examples of autobiographical critical writing that I read in scholarly journals, there was quite a bit of talk about genitalia. There was also a healthy amount of “toilet humor,” which prompted one frequent reader of this kind of material to make a remark about how interesting it is to find such toilet humor in academic writing, as many married couples manage to tiptoe around the subject for the course of a whole marriage. Okay, I suppose I can’t write an entry about all these autobiographical flourishes without offering at least one about me. Being married myself, I will reluctantly admit that I keep no secrets from my wife about bodily functions. We maintain an open-door policy on the bathroom…Don’t get the idea that we love to focus attention on the subject; this decision is incidental to our communication as a married couple, as we seem content to talk to each other at nearly all times, despite the activities in which we might be otherwise engaged. Though even I hate to admit it, bathroom behavior (in much the same way as sexual behavior) reveals quite a bit of who we truly are underneath social conventions. In a relationship, coming face-to-face with your partner’s toilet tendencies could be considered the height of intimacy, a pinnacle many refuse to scale.

Similarly, I recently watched a documentary about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in which he was asked what he found interesting about the biographies of renowned philosophers. He replied that he would be interested in their sex lives, though this information was almost always carefully protected. Though Derrida is one who is easy to oversimplify, I imagine he was drawing attention to how “private” aspects of our personality such as our sex lives are so revealing about who we really are. We offer autobiographical details in nearly everything we do, but when we consciously choose to reveal certain things about ourselves, we usually elect to highlight either our grandest triumphs (naturally) or our most human qualities. Our resumes beam our accomplishments, but we prove we are “down to earth” by telling stories on ourselves that highlight our occasional dimwittedness and peccadilloes. Ultimately, it’s often a rhetorical strategy to disclose our toilet behavior because it reminds whoever’s listening that we’re real people, too, despite our carefully constructed personas that observe social conventions and etiquette. We have to go to the toilet, though. We can’t help it that we are, in fact, real people. So, let’s put aside the myth of objectivity for a second to take a bathroom break.

The Self-Contained Universe?

I admit, though with reservation, that I am a frequent player of the latest Grand Theft Auto videogame. This pixilated distraction is emblematic of the trouble so many young men of the Nintendo generation that now find themselves in due to their reliance upon virtual violence as a source of entertaining input. No, this is not a journal to vindicate alarmist critics of media that supposedly incite tendencies toward ultraviolence amongst youth culture (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921/); this first entry in this journal merely draws attention to a influence that is more subtle but seems to be present throughout many forms of media: the notion of a self-contained universe.

I recently realized something viewing the ABC show Lost a couple of months ago (http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index.html). If you’re not familiar with the show, it tells the story of the survivors of a plane crash on a deserted island. I should note at the outset that Lost is one of a few shows currently on television (Fox’s 24 among them) that is highly episodic in its style: cliffhangers at the end of nearly every show link episodes together in a grand unraveling of a “mythology” (to use parlance associated with rabid fans of the now-defunct The X-Files). This narrative approach underscores the concept of this deserted island itself, as the characters on the show cannot leave the island by its very design. To give one example, when one of the leaders of the survivors is faced with the problem of protecting the camp from other mysterious inhabitants of the island, he remembers firearms in a briefcase carried by a marshal on the plane. He had buried the marshal, however, after he died from injuries sustained in the crash. To open the briefcase, he must then exhume the marshal’s body, retrieve the key from around his neck and only then can he access the guns for defensive purposes. This kind of process struck me as a familiar one, but it took me awhile to recognize where I had seen this kind of process before; finally, I remembered my gaming experience.

Role-playing games do stimulate the imagination, but only to the extent that the designers of the game are capable of providing an imaginative space. As you walk from screen to screen in a game, you cannot walk into an area that has not already been created. Rare glitches offer new corners for exploration, but these areas too are but extensions of a self-contained universe that has already been fixed and figured out, its gravities and logics always and immutably set. We empathize with our digital daimons for the same reason we enjoy Lost: the playing field is leveled when we are bound alongside the characters inside a universe that is self-contained, in which guns cannot be manufactured, only found as they already exist. Reading some of the work of Slavoj Zizek recently (his contribution to the On Belief: Thinking in Action series, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415255325/qid=1110750995/sr=1-22/ref=sr_1_22/103-5169284-2356632?v=glance&s=books), I am convinced that we seek refuge in the digital world not to escape our material bodies and suspend our identities, but we come here looking for new ones. Paradoxically, I christen my first foray into the blogosphere with an attempt to discover myself (an attempt that is counterintuitive in a world in which the invention of a persona and re-creation is standard) and also to explore different facets of my personality that are not so easily classifiable (hence this blog’s esoteric name). This is indeed a self-contained universe: all that will nourish or destroy me is already here, but that we already knew. The exploration is the part that makes for good television.