Switcheroos & Pees & Poos🚽💩💩

In praise of toilet humor and bodily function tunes

Jun 07, 2024

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. It’s a category that can be just as pernicious and difficult to eradicate from the mental spin cycle as the jingle, the TV theme song, and the Phil Collins ballad.

I call it the switcheroo.

Switcheroos are earworms in which you replace the lyrics of an existing song with new ones, usually based on your state of mind. This could be sadness, anger, elation, boredom, goofiness, or anything in between.

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. This means that I replace widely known song lyrics with words pertaining to the act of or results from pooping, farting, belching, vomiting, peeing, etc. You know, the timeless brand of humor dedicated to celebrating our bodies’ natural (or sometimes supernatural) releases and emissions.

Here’s 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
Pepto 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 endless.

If it doesn’t already exist, I should create a card game based on this popular song lyric replacement concept! I’m spitballing here, but perhaps how it works is one person picks a “song card” from a box. Each card lists the artist and song on one side and the verse and/or chorus lyrics on the back. (See image of the prototype at the top of the post.)

The other players have one minute (or maybe two) to rewrite the words using the most juvenile/body function terms possible. The resulting lyrics are placed anonymously in a specially designed poop bag. The designated “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, Spotify, or some other streaming service to allow the lyrical excerpts of each song to be played.

Oooh! And maybe there’s an expansion pack version of the game that comes with a microphone and speaker, and players can sing their custom versions along with the original music, karaoke style! Oh wait, that wouldn’t allow for anonymity, then. Maybe the person with the winning lyric gets an opportunity for bonus points if they sing their new song.

These details can be worked out later. I mean, how much could the song rights cost for this game anyway? Pennies!

I agree that this idea is brilliant, and I’m trusting that none of you will steal it. Do any of you game designers out there want to partner with me?

But wait, there’s more!

For the easily offended, there can be a clean version of Switcheroo. Perhaps there’s a separate card pile that designates unique Switcheroo topics, such as food, sports, footwear, names of presidents, farm animals, and global cities—anything that isn’t too esoteric and offers plenty of options.

So, for example, the aforementioned “Yellow Submarine” could be paired with “food at a barbecue,” and the players would need to replace the lyrics with words like picnic, ants, and hot dogs.

Can we get this fast-tracked for the upcoming holiday season?

Although my particular body function peccadillo has been part of my switcheroo earworm oeuvre for as long as I can remember, I feel like it jumped to a new level around 2007, right about the time 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. I’m pretty sure I saw a video of her doing stand-up soon after. Over the next couple of decades, she would appear in many of my favorite films and TV shows, including Something About Mary, School of Rock, Futurama, and Masters of Sex.

Sarah was (and is) a politically incorrect, potty-mouth comedienne with a penchant for singing politically incorrect, potty-mouthed songs.

But it was her ode to poop, featured 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 that she had invited me over to clean her whole house and isn’t sick at all.

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.

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 extended the bar horizontally far wider than it’d ever been before. Spreading 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 on a deer carcass. I’m thinking of the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles. 50 years later, this scene is still considered one of the most landmark comedy moments in cinema history. Maybe the two-minute bean-slurping nocturnal emission scene was 1 minute 45 seconds too long for you, but to a large segment of the world populace, it was the perfect length.

But, for every Blazing Saddle, there are a hundred crappy films that deserve to be flushed down the toilet.

This just proves my point. We need junk jewelry so that 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 crapper to cultural relevance, requires not only genuine talent but also an openness and a willingness to be vulnerable.

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.

Earworms and Song Loops

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