On Potty Humor

 

If you know me well, you know I love potty humor. Say the word poo or booger or peepee or weiner and I will snicker. My son is finally at the age where he is beginning to explore potty humor too. It’s a little slice of heaven.

From the bathroom this morning while my son was doing his business, to the tune of “Centerfield”: 

Put me in coach

I’m ready to poop
Today
Look at me
I can poop
Centerpoop

And the other day, hanging out with one of my best mommy friends, I witnessed her daughter picking her nose and eating it. This is a novelty for me, as I was never a nose picker myself. Except for the boogers I used to scrape onto the rim of my Snoopy garbage pail. “I thought you couldn’t get her to eat anything,” I joked to my friend.

My son had a stomach bug last winter and hollered out, “Diareeta! Here it comes!” The laughs from his proclamation squirted a bit of lightness into an otherwise challenging few days stuck at home with a sick kid.

But lately I’ve been wondering why this humor is so funny.  A quick google search does little to illuminate my question, but does provide new gems such as “vagina cheeks” to incorporate into my lexicon. And strangely, some reinforcement, from an article entitled How to Tame Potty Humor on Parenting.com:  "A lot of humor is being irreverent; that gives us control over anxiety," declares Tufts University child-development professor W. George Scarlett, Ph.D.

God knows I’ve got the anxiety part down: perhaps this is why my sense of humor failed to evolve past that of a nine-year-old. 

I will say that I don’t encourage my son’s potty humor, except when the occasional laugh squeaks out. Like the time he yanked his pants down and said, “I’m going to poop all over Papa!”

But I don’t discourage it, either. Discouraging his behavior often backfires, as it did this very morning, when I asked him to please not stand at the front window naked. I asked him nicely, and then turned my back to change my daughter’s poopy diaper. By the time I turned back around, I found the need to utter this unexpected phrase: “Please remove your penis from the windowsill.”

 Window weiner.