Switcheroos & Pees & Poos

Or, in praise of toilet humor

There’s a particular type of earworm I haven’t yet talked about. One that is less common, less widely recognized, less credited for its unique brand of sonic torture, which can be be just as pernicious and difficult to eradicate from the mental spin cycle. 

I call it the switcheroo.

Switcheroos are earworms where you replace the lyrics of an existing sticky song with new ones, usually based on your state of mind. It could be sadness, anger, elation, boredom, goofiness. 

For me (and I would bet a few of you too), “state of mind” often means channeling my inner 10 year-old. In other words: a bodily-function-obsessed potty mouth. Which means I replace widely known song lyrics with words pertaining to the act of or result from pooping, farting, belching, vomiting, peeing, etc. You know, the timeless form of humor dedicated to our bodies’ natural (or sometimes supernatural) releases. 

Here an example in case you don’t. 

Sung to the tune of “Yellow Submarine”

🎵We all live in a pee and poo latrine

A pee and poo latrine

Pee and poo latrine

(repeat)🎵

Another example:

To the tune of “Let it Be”

(Yes, Beatles’ songs tend to align with these types of earworms)

🎵When I find myself in times of constipation

Pesto Bismol comes to me

Loosening my bowels

Set ‘em free

And in my hundredth hour of pooplessness 

The bottle standing right in front of me

Bright pink words of wisdom

Set ‘em free

Set ‘em free 

Set ‘em free🎵

(You get the gist)

It’s a rather easy game to play as anything with me/see/sea, or any word with a hard “e” sound can be replaced with “pee.” And you/knew/clue/shoe, etc. makes a perfect “poo.” The same goes for art/fart, drink/stink, miss/piss, fluke/puke, etc. The possibilities are literally endless. 

In fact, if this doesn’t already exist, I should create a card game based on this popular song lyric replacement concept! I’m spitballing here, but perhaps one person picks a “song card” from a box. Each card lists the artist and song on one side of a card, the lyrics on the back. The other players have one minute to rewrite the words using the most juvenile/bodily function terms possible. The results are placed anonymously in a specially designed poop bag and the card picker has to pick their favorite lyrical switcheroo. It’s like “Cards Against Humanity” but with songs. Maybe there can be a tie in with Apple Music or Spotify or some other streaming service to allow the lyrical segments of each song to be played. 

Oooh! And maybe there’s a microphone and people can sing their versions along with the original song, karaoke style! Oh wait, that wouldn’t be anonymous then. Well, those details can be worked out later. I mean, how much could the song rights cost for this anyway? Pennies!

This idea is brilliant, I agree, and I’m trusting that none of you will steal it. Any game designers out there wanna partner with me? 

This lyric exchange earworm form doesn’t have to be body function related. Perhaps this is my particular curse to bear. Maybe for you, it’s elements from the periodic table. Perhaps your switcheroo terms are related to food, sports, footwear, names of presidents, farm animals. Anything that tends to come to you easily is what I would suggest, should you desire to refine your skills with this particular form of earworm.

In fact, now that I am exploring this a bit more, perhaps my switcheroo card game could be more expansive and the types of replacement words players must use for the song lyrics are based on a specific topic. Which are chosen from another set of topic cards! So “Yellow Submarine” could be paired with “food at a barbecue” and the players need to replace lyrics with words like picnic and ants and hot dogs. 

I’ll keep working on it.

Although my particular body function peccadillo has been part of my switcheroo oeuvre for as long as I can remember, I feel like it jumped to a new level around 2007, when The Sarah Silverman Program first aired on Comedy Central. 

I’d been a huge Sarah Silverman fan since seeing her on the Larry Sanders show in 1996. And then I’m pretty sure I saw of video of her doing stand-up soon after. Sarah was a politically incorrect, potty-mouth comedienne who loved to sing politically incorrect, potty-mouthed songs. But it was her ode to poop on the Sarah Silverman Program that cemented my love.

I feel a little bit uncomfortable admitting this (says the person who changes Beatles’ lyrics to poop jokes), but years ago I wrote a fan fiction piece about Sarah Silverman that I actually sent to her via her Facebook group. (Can you believe I never got a thank you???) It was based on an actual dream I had about her, and before you start raising your hackles, the dream was completely consensual. Well, sorta.

In the dream, Sarah calls me (cause we are besties) and asks me to bring her chicken noodle soup cause she’s sick. I come over, soup in tow and she’s in bed with her dog, Duck (I’d always thought his name was Doug). She asks me if I wouldn’t mind cleaning her kitchen and I reluctantly agree because she asks so nicely. Pretty soon I realize she had invited me over to clean her whole house and isn’t sick at all. So I suppose there’s a slight fetishy element to the dream, but I can tell you that my dream self did it to be nice, not as a turn on. Well, maybe a little bit of a turn on. Here’s the piece if you want to read it.

Sarah and Duck

I was going to say that Sarah elevated the toilet humor genre to new heights, but I don’t think she raised the bar so much as spread it horizontally a lot wider than it’d ever been before. Covering her shit across the landscape of comedy, in case I was being too subtle.

There’s a particular timelessness that the best toilet humor carries with it, like a swarm of flies. Think of the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles. 50 years later, this scene is still considered one of the landmark comedy moments in cinema history. Maybe the two-minute bean-eating nocturnal emission scene was a minute 45 seconds too long for you, but for a large segment of the world, it was the perfect length.

Sure, for every Blazing Saddle, there are a hundred crappy films. But that just proves my point. It makes the diamonds in the rough shine even brighter. Think of Bridesmaids. Is there a scene more memorable, more laugh-out-loud hilarious than Melissa McCarthy pooping in a sink or Maya Rudolph in a wedding dress, shitting herself in the middle of the street?

You could say this type of humor is immature, childish, going for the lowest common denominator. Maybe you are right.

But to truly rise from the bowels of the potty humor art form, to reach the annals of the genre, to Blaze a trail from the toilet to cultural relevance, requires a genuine talent, dare I say an openness and a willingness to be vulnerable.

And Sarah Silverman has that in spades. She says it like it is, she doesn’t try and disguise the true facts of life with a bouquet of potpourri. We all poop. We all pee. We all fart and belch. We can pretend we don’t, we can hide our bodily functions behind closed doors and behind zipped lips. But when we are willing to expose our full selves, the dark and the light, the good the bad and the ugly, then no matter what happens, as we age, as we get sick, we can hold our heads high and let our bodies do what they do, until they serve us no more.