peeing and farting in movies and TV for kids: research and observations

so my sister and her boyf were up in town having a night for themselves and i was niece-sitting

we watched:
1: Hotel Transylvania 2: the follow-up to HT (which i love) is not really quite so good
2: an ep of Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir (superheroes that are kids in school IN PARIS: there is an undertow of very french class war, ladybug's dad is a baker who makes croissants, the snooty girl at school is daughter of the mayor of paris and hence called chloe bourgeois)
3: Ghost Patrol (a 45-min short movie that's basically Ghostbusters except they're kids)
4: an ep of LoliRock (the spice girls if they were a trio who could turn into magical space princesses and fight skeletor-esque evil)
5: Mummy, I'm a Zombie (the follow-up to Daddy, I'm a Zombie obviously)
6: an ep of home: adventures with tip & oh (OMG this is weird shit: basically the worlds and cultures of humans and boovs, an alien race, have combined and a spunky girl and her emo boov pal have adventures: this one was about FANDOM)

1: featured a pee gag (the green blobby creature against a tree: four streams, my niece was keen to point out)
5: featured a fart gag, commenting on smell (the fat kid) and a pee gag (a magical salamander, in the mummy princess's hair)
6: featured a fart gag (when you restart a boov's heart after it has stopped from misery and disappointment, farting is involved)

this is a LOT more farting and peeing than you saw in TV and movies aimed at kids when i was my niece's age! has it arrived from japan maybe? (there's an element of japanese cartoon style in 2 and 4 and much more than just an element in 6)

Ren and Stimpy to thread

NOT AIMED AT KIDS

i was a kid when i watched it

ok fair enough -- it was a gateway moment and is clearly in some sense a key ancestor of all this (especially home: adventures with tip & oh) but at the time kricfalusi was very self-consciously being cap-T Transgressive as well deliberately harking back to the era of cartoons for grown-ups (warners etc in the 40s)

cheers mate. Yeah the show was on the border between being aimed at kids/adults. love that Looney tunes was such a big influence on R&S, the tribute to the detail in frame by frame and not repeating expressions/gestures animation-wise. Carry on :)

As a kid, I hated this stuff when it would crop up.... Ren and Stimpy (which yeah was aggressively marketed to kids - I mean it debuted in a programming block alongside Rugrats and Doug) is def key, I more or less tolerated all of these type of jokes tho they made me uncomfortable. Timon and Pumbaa, too... and maybe some video games in the 16 bit era? Have to be some things where you attack by belching at ppl or something right?

I'm thinking that around the same time, live action comedy, including stuff that kids 10 and up might be exposed to, was also going more this direction... Farrelly Brothers, Married With Children, etc. I haaaated this.

Agreed that before R&S it was pretty much taboo, which was a big part of why that show got so much pushback. Hard to imagine jokes like this in your average Hanna Barbera factory product, or any Disney Afternoon jam. By the time of Phantom Menace and Shrek it was just like, groan, ugh, they're putting these things in as an easy dumb way to get little kids to laugh.

Boogerman is a good example of a sega game wherein the character uses flatulence as a "move"

I dont see much of this in what my kids watch. Maybe some in Teen Titans Go i guess.

really don't think kids should be learning about farts until they're at least in middle school, maybe i'm old fashioned

Lion King also "broke the mold" in this regard recall, though more in an implied fashion

As a kid, I hated this stuff when it would crop up.... Ren and Stimpy (which yeah was aggressively marketed to kids - I mean it debuted in a programming block alongside Rugrats and Doug) is def key, I more or less tolerated all of these type of jokes tho they made me uncomfortable.

dude i thought i was the only one.

The fart jokes aren't all there was to R & S - there's some genuine pathos there.

Australian series 'Round The Twist' has an episode (series 2 episode 3 'Little Squirt') that centres around a 'who can piss the highest?' contest.

The various noises and/or substances that emit from a variety of different orifices are pretty much the lifeblood of comedy.

not sure blood is the appropriate bodily fluid for that statement tbh

fart jokes are literally the oldest jokes in history

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-joke-life/worlds-oldest-joke-traced-back-to-1900-bc-idUKL129052420080731

My children's entertainment is pretty free of this stuff, but they went through a thing where they were watching a weird wordless Korean animation series called "Larva" on Netflix. A lot of it was based around farts and stuff and I was glad when they got tired of it and moved on to something else.

Call me Prudey McPrude but I don't want scatological humor even in my own entertainment (not judging those who like it; it's just never been funny in the slightest to me).

not a movie or TV but I read a Beano annual a couple of Christmases ago and was outraged to find that it now treats breaking wind as a source of humour. outraged because in my day this was deemed off limits and if my generation were coddled so should each one after it be

^^^

I also believe kids are going to come up with this humor on their own so why not use limited screentime to offer them something else? I was watching Moana recently, and loving it, but the couple jokes of this sort seemed like such self-sabotage... like right when you might be starting to build up some tension or fear or wonder --- hey! comic relief! funny! He's peeing in the water!

And you can have easy laughs for kids in a movie that also takes its time to develop feelings and a mood. E.T. is my go-to for this, but Spirited Away also comes to mind - the scene with the stink monster, I imagine, gets laughs from kids just because everyone's holding their breath and obviously displeased by something that's stinky, but it doesn't throw off the whole tone of the movie and it comes at a moment when we want a laugh, not right after someone's found the resolve to pursue their quest or whatever. But maybe this is more about the willy-nilly dispersal of comic relief where no relief is required (see also: most of the jokes and callbacks in Force Awakens) than about bodily functions per se.

that's an xpost

Australian series 'Round The Twist' has an episode (series 2 episode 3 'Little Squirt') that centres around a 'who can piss the highest?' contest.

― Zings Can Only Get Better (snoball)

Came here to post this one. Round the Twist was a great show.

This isn't my preferred form of entertainment either but some of you guys are being weirdly prudish. And this was definitely around before Ren & Stimpy, wtf? I mean, I don't even remember it being the focus of R&S and I've watched it a fair bit as an adult, it's more about grotesque eyeballs and throbbing veins and the psychosis of a chihuahua.

an episode of Bobby's World (Howie Mandel cartoon) had a moment where Bobby asked his Uncle "how did you blow bubbles without your mouth" and he said "let's keep that our little secret"

well like I said, I liked ren and stimpy! I just liked it in spite of the grossout body function stuff. I liked all the yelling, and the odd-couple comedy. prudish maybe, could be I was just a prudish kid. but it's always a drag when a show is shoving stuff at you and saying "you find this funny, right??" when you don't find it funny. it's possible I would have had fun at "dumb and dumber" without those jokes.... who knows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfCWMhGOBGo

Teen Titans Go! is super into butts as a comedy concept so much so that it's a bit of a fixation far past Ren & Stimpy

Earliest manifestation I can think of for this is Charlie and his grandfather having to belch to counteract the Fizzy Lifting Drinks in the Willy Wonka movie.

there was an episode of Little House on the Prairie where Laura says to a younger girl "I thought you had to go to the bathroom" and the girl says "I already did" and the camera zoomed in on a puddle stain on the ground.

no, not a joke - my friends and I were cackling about it all afternoon (cos itw as normally that "boring adult show")

The husband has been reading Roald Dahl's "classic" the BFG (big fuckin' giant, as I call it) to our son and from what I overhear from the adjoining room, that thing is rife with fart jokes.

Willie Wonka burping is a good example. I'm sitting here thinking "wtf surely kids books and things had fart jokes way back when" but now I'm struggling to think of anything.

glad i'm not a kid now b/c this stuff drove me crazy, i was an easily grossed-out kid.

xxp i saw some of the bfg movie in the company of a friend's kids and there was a big fart scene that had them exploding with laughter.

not judging those who like it; it's just never been funny in the slightest to me

but yeah this is me too.

Good stuff here
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x-kqfL5P2tY

lol that reminds me in the early 80s my sister was at film college with (and hence i used to know) the scriptwriter and the director of this:

http://media.sinematurk.com/film/d/b9/9e2b6243285e/15160_1.jpg

iirc it was a long-nurtured script the two of them had always yearned to bring to the big screen

(i have never seen it hence perhaps why i had omitted it from my initial research)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbMLW4s2pBg

Home is a fantastic show, I like it better than the movie. There is some amount of farting in it, but it is used sparingly, sometimes as the main plot device.

yes i watched several more eps of home last night (no longer with my niece) and it's good: i really like rachel crow's voice-acting for tip

oh is basically stimpy though

Tip’s mom is my favorite. Lucy Tucci.

so i'm feeling a bit sheepish and sonned (inc.by myself re: thunderpants) at this stage in the thread: this tendency is by no means recent and actually wasn't entirely new 25 years ago, tho it seems to have gathered momentum in the 2000s

roald dahl seems an outlier to me: his approach to kidlit is "there's a war between children and adults and the adults are bad and wrong and so are most kids tbf", which is quite unusual (as i've probably noted on ilx before, i'm distantly related to dahl and my feelings abt him are somewhat coloured by family stories)

i still consider ren&stimpy a game-changer, less in terms of overt fart jokes in cartoons (tho i think as cited in the thread only bobby's world predates R&S? the lion king feels as if it ought to but actually came after) than in terms of the maker's known aims -- which were to be vividly GROSS and INTENSE and BIZARRE, in a way i don't feel cartoons had on the whole been before that? (happy to be corrected here)

(ps in my defence i never saw bobby's world -- was it even broadcast in the UK -- and i also suspect the protocols of UK TV quarantined this stuff via broadcast hour)

ymp mentions a korean animation called larva: which gives me the chance to go back and re-attempt something i said in passing: i had vaguely understood that chinese and japanese and korean popular culture is much less puritanical about this kind of stuff but i'm not saying this with any kind expertise AT ALL so i may be just wrong (the reason for bringing it up is that cartooning and animation styles have cross-pollinated in the last two or three decades, so perhaps this is part of that) (yes it's a bedrock of all humour back to the sumerians in 1900BC but it definitely vanished from official and approved children's culture in the UK and the US, as opposed to playground and no-adults-present humour etc: animated films being a terrain where adults are quite likely to be present, since they paid for the cinema ticket)

the inflow of ideas from games never occurred to me (i know nothing abt games after tetris, which is light on this kind of material)

(there's also the entire world of gross rubber novelty items: plastic vomit and such)

in terms of interrupting the narrative flow: i think what actually made me think about it was how little it felt it was doing this, in any of the four examples cited: these were all minor gags-in-passing that made sense as part of the story being told (the exception is the magical salamander peeing on the mummy princess zombie girl's head: bcz magical items being collected in a quest don't usually step out of character in this way -- tho the way the gag happened and was commented on it might just be a callback to a similar moment in daddy i'm a zombie that i've forgotten)

thus: the peeing gag in HT2 was during a car journey, at a point where any delay in the journey was a frustration to the main characters; the fat kid fart gag in MIAZ was standard stand-by-me bonding-bullying stuff, as a comic response to fear; and in home: the adventures of tip and oh, the alien boovs are basically a balloon or a bubble people, so flatulence is somewhat of their essence (i didn't know this at the time of the O/P having only watched one ep)

i was quite prudish myself as a kid but also quite impatient with the so-called taboo-busting of my peers -- my niece (an only kid) has mainly grown up watching everything with her mum or her dad and certainly wasn't giggling at any of these (her interest in the HT2 blob-creature's four streams of pee was at least partly more physiological: she is fascinated by bodies inside and out and has all kinds of books abt the human body)

last point reminds of the final thing that struck me: none of these were off-stage or implied gags -- you actually saw the pee right there in the cartoon

actually one definite precursor in the GROSS and INTENSE and BIZARRE stakes is obviously pee-wee, which from the title on in was always skirting this territory (and of course arose out of the crossover of underground comix and the transgressive punk cartooning of the late 70s)

yeah i'm with emily that farts weren't the focus of R&S, and it seems to be a misreading to think this is the case. i mean, the gross-out level included all manner of physical/mental debilitation, like teeth falling out, brain washing, space-induced psychosis

but suppose it was an influence on cow n chicken/sponge bob and other gross shows enough where those base jokes stuck

has anyone actually made that claim about R&S tho?

only ross :D

lol, my perception is it was a stumbling block for people, but it's not what i remember. i'll move along here

actually one definite precursor in the GROSS and INTENSE and BIZARRE stakes is obviously pee-we

I don't think this is accurate at all in terms of Pee-Wee's Playhouse (which I have just watched all five seasons of in the past year w my kids). It is certainly bizarre and occasionally intense but bodily humor is not really part of it. I can't think of a single instance of it tbh.

what Pee-Wee *did* foreground (and pioneer) was multi-ethnic gender fluidity

the pu pu platter? all the talking chairs that looked like toilets? pee-wee-as-kid routinely grossed kid-style by kissing and flirting among the grown-up characters?

i agree the word "skirt" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my post but the vibe of the show was often pretend-circling unspoken topics that remained unspoken, but somehow right there also

i just mean pee-wee, not pee-wee-as-kid

the pu pu platter?

I don't even remember this gag, which is more of a pun/hidden joke that doubles as an exotica reference to Hawaii while also sounding like a toddler joke, I guess.

all the talking chairs that looked like toilets?

never made this connection. toilets have holes in them iirc.

pee-wee-as-kid routinely grossed kid-style by kissing and flirting among the grown-up characters?

idg how this is in any way related to peeing and farting jokes. totally normal and near-universal reaction for kids to be grossed out by displays of affection ime, and Pee-Wee is basically an overgrown kid, so.

Having rewatched much of the early Ren & Stimpy stuff recently, I'd almost argue against it being for kids.

my parents expressly forbade me from watching it

8 votes

My parents forbade me from watching Simpsons but lord knows how I got ren and stimpy past them

I get weirded out by people saying parents forbade them from stuff like this. I was well into my 20s when this all came out! Ya bunch of bebbies :P

I don't think it arrived from Japan; I get annoyed by this, too, but I noticed when the Lion King was back in theaters that Poomba's whole character is defined by his farting - it's actually the reason he's run away from civilization. the big lol payoff in his song about it (which, practically alone among fart jokes in kids movies, makes me giggle every time) is when he sings "I got downhearted / every time that I --" and then his friend interrupts him, saying "not in front of the kids." Super-meta for Disney.

lol trayce, my parents are conservative christians so it was a steep climb. /recovering

lol Ross i work with a guy who had the same deal. he says he’s only ever seen, even now, half a dozen simpsons eps. he’s a stand up comic so that makes it extra wtf

This Bugs Bunny cartoon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hare_Grows_in_Manhattan) has a peeing joke in it.

The gang of dogs reappears and marches in on Bugs menacingly. Bugs grabs a book and threatens to hit them with it in his "last stand". The dogs' eyes open wide when they see the book, and they turn around and race to, and across, the Brooklyn Bridge. The puzzled Bugs looks at the book and sees that it is the then-recent and famous novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which was obviously the inspiration for the cartoon's title.

I have a feeling that other Warner Bros cartoons, and possibly Tom & Jerry too, might have the occasional pee joke, not so sure about farting.

I suspect this is common to a lot of cultures, however the earliest mention in the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_my_finger references Ozu of all people back in 1959.

Was going to mention Good Morning, a remake of his earlier silent I Was Born, But... - can't remember if all the farting stuff is also in the original. Mainly wanted to make this post so as to draw out the (previously unmentioned!) connection between these films and Ren & Stimpy, inasmuch as they're all full of childish things but are not necessarily aimed primarily at children. Perhaps the equivalent for those of us Born, But Earlier..., is the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, which seemed like the most hilariously transgressive thing ever when I was about thirteen.

yes i dimly remember a tom&jerry scene where someone reddens deeply and looks out at the camera bcz they've peed themselves: the most likely candidate is the little baby mouse who wears a nappy, who jerry is sometimes shepherding, but i actually don't remember (the others also used to redden now and then)

whewn they first came out the warners shorts were shown in cinemas before films that adults were viewing, am i right about that? (nearly wrote "adult films", which would totally confuse the issue)

by the 60s in the UK you generally saw them at the limits of little kids' TV -- ie around 6ish, when mixed-age viewing started -- and in the 80s i seem to recall channel 4 used them a lot for a while to plug up gaps all over its still evolving schedule: i haven't actually seen a tom & jerry cartoon for years though, did nickelodeon swallow them all up or have they just vanished from television onto DVD?

i haven't actually seen a tom & jerry cartoon for years though, did nickelodeon swallow them all up or have they just vanished from television onto DVD?

It's an injustice! (Let's see if anyone gets that reference).

I suspect that TV channels are v wary about broadcasting a lot of the classic T&J cartoons these days because of the black housemaid character.

yeah :(

Not to mention the violence, occasional alcohol abuse etc. The housemaid character isn't in that many of them.

... and, probably worst of all, smoking!

... and sex... sometimes both:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxSdA0oWKuU

Tom & Jerry was always the shittiest of the old-school cartoon franchises, let's be real

I don't think you've ever been more wrong about anything in your life, I hope not anyway.

Warner Bros, Disney, Fleischer, Lantz were all better

Tom and Jerry is awesome. As far as looney tunes containing fart jokes, I can't recall any - it's mostly madcap slapstick and more on the violent side than anything. Of course tom and Jerry is a notch above regarding violence

(xp) Balls. I don't consider Warner Bros to be operating in the same area. The rest nowhere near as good.

yr insane if you don't think those Flesicher Popeye cartoons or Disney's 50s Goofy and Donald shorts are not miles better than T&J imo

Yeah and early Mickey and mouse ?

I like those too. Disney can gtf though apart from DD & Goofy...& Pluto.(xp)

dunno man, early Mickey where he is *essentially* Donald Duck in spirit is pretty classic (1920s)

I only remember seeing Disney shorts on holidays (which meant(Disney specials, which were mostly clips from whatever big movie had rotated back into re-release, plus a tiny bit of Donald Duck action) and once at another kid's birthday (their parents were rich and had a film projector: it was the one where mickey is eating a corncob and sticks his fork in a plug socket and all the corns pop off). It wasn't routinely available on the TV.

(We didn't have BBC2 for ages after everyone else bcz our telly didn't have enough knobs, but I doubt this was where the hour-long Goofy extravaganzas were being hidden.)

Disney stuff was on TV in the US via Disney's anthology tv shows, which ran for decades, but I also have distinct memories of being shown Disney shorts on film *in school*.

A bit like Sgt Bilko, Tom & Jerry may be one of those bits of American popular culture more beloved in the UK than the US - from when I was growing up, I always remember it as being a luxury treat sprinkled around the BBC schedule, frequently shown in the early evening for the whole family to enjoy etc. As for 'better', yes cases could be made for Warner Bros or Disney, but Walter Lantz? Woody Woodpecker is insufferable, and the animation subpar.

xp We definitely got the Disney educational shorts like Donald in Mathmagic Land, etc. in school. I count those as separate from the regular shorts like Mickey and the Beanstalk.

pathetic Disney pedantry: Mickey and the Beanstalk isn't a short! It's a longer mini-feature, part of the Fun and Fancy Free package film.

11 eps in i'm still enjoying HOME: ADVENTURES WITH TIP AND OH, which i do think pushes at least a bit against the limits LBI is deploring upthread

(it's a bit YA but it still has echoes of ren and stimpy: tip is rennish and oh is very stimpy-esque)

also powerpuff girls

the episode of "tip and oh" called POOK POOKS is *entirely* abt farting: being embarrassed abt it and not being embarrassed

Not tv or movies, but I chaperoned my daughter's first grade field trip to the pumpkin patch the other day and one of her classmates had a shirt depicting several popular emojis including, of course, the poop emoji. The teachers made no special fuss or mention about this 6-year-old's poop shirt. I cannot goddamn deal with this world I live in.

John Lewis Ad.

On a trip to kmart last week, my daughter pointed out a set of emoji pajamas that came with a poop hat. Poop and pajamas do not mix!

http://m.kmart.com/emoji-men-s-hooded-one-piece-pajamas/p-046VA99290612P

it's not actual poop

in the interests of advanced pee & fart studies i am watching this week's ep of THE APPRENTICE, which is abt monetising picking up dog poo

just like veery other ep amirite

but Walter Lantz? Woody Woodpecker is insufferable, and the animation subpar

otm x 1000

I was subjected to Walter Lantz and Woody Woodpecker repeatedly as a young person. It was viscerally awful. Lantz himself very obviously envied Walt Disney so badly he could taste it, yet he invariably came across as an insufferable egotist no child could possibly love. I was un-fondly remembering all this yesterday while out walking, so I searched ilx to see what it had to say.

Tom & Jerry was always the shittiest of the old-school cartoon franchises, let's be real

― Οὖτις, Thursday, 12 October 2017 15:28 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm surprised Shakey didn't go into hiding after this post.

way upthread, Dr. Casino mentions the scene in Moana where Maui intentionally pees in the water up-current from Moana, that seems pretty edgy for Disney (potty-play/water-sports).

under-examined topic, underrated thread

children spontaneously make fart, pee and poop jokes among themselves unprompted by any adult input. they are very innocent and rudimentary jokes. I think circus clowns and vaudeville comedians of the pratfall variety regularly incorporated fart, pee and poop jokes in their routines. what's uncomfortable is when these jokes are formed in a mean-spirited or aggressive way that has some subtext of threats or bullying.

I think circus clowns and vaudeville comedians of the pratfall variety regularly incorporated fart, pee and poop jokes in their routines.

Not really selling fart, pee and poop jokes there.

rewatching Degrassi (Junior High) for the bazumpteenth time rn and one new thing stood out -- SO MANY SCENES of boys literally peeing in the boys' bathroom. Like standing, peeing, zipping, and washing their hands in a barely perfunctory manner. No scenes of girls peeing, but obvs lots of bathroom scenes thanks to Stephanie Kaye etc.

lol at the digression upthread that the chairs on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse look like sentient toilets

i still consider ren&stimpy a game-changer, less in terms of overt fart jokes in cartoons (tho i think as cited in the thread only bobby's world predates R&S? the lion king feels as if it ought to but actually came after) than in terms of the maker's known aims -- which were to be vividly GROSS and INTENSE and BIZARRE, in a way i don't feel cartoons had on the whole been before that? (happy to be corrected here)

Not a cartoon, but You Can't Do That On Television was probably the first.

Nature October 14, 1983 Alasdair Gillis, Abby Hagyard, Kevin Kubusheskie, Vanessa Lindores, Les Lye, Christine McGlade, Lisa Ruddy Nickelodeon cut the final seconds of the "Mandatory Can of Beans" sketch where Lance breaks wind and a sound effect is heard. Ironically, during the show's later seasons, fart jokes were encouraged by the network.

Ren and Stimpy makes a lot of overt visual references to Basil Wolverton's comics and illustrations for Mad magazine in the 50's, particularly the very detailed, gruesome close-ups but also in the overall visual style.

i absolutely loved You Can’t Do That On Television. my mom hated it. she said they got laughs out of putting each other down. i was like, yes exactly!

Ren & Stimpy was the real endurance test- As Doctor Casino said upthread, it was something I tolerated more than enjoyed- But, while Basil Wolverton/MAD is the more obvious inspiration, I don't think R&S could have hit quite the same note ("in terms of the maker's known aims -- which were to be vividly GROSS and INTENSE and BIZARRE") without the warm-up band of You Can't Do That On Television:

Starting with the 1981 season, most episodes featured sketches with the kids eating at Barth's Burgery, a fast-food burger restaurant run by Barth (played by Les Lye), a chain-smoking, unpleasant, disgusting cook who used unsanitary and questionable methods of creating burgers. Most of the sketches began with Barth giving the kids their orders, the kids hesitant on eating their food, Barth telling them what he used as burger meat (most of the time he said unpleasant things like rodents, poison, various animals not fit for human consumption, used kitty litter, human body parts, etc.) and the kids growing queasy and eventually throwing up.

The children on the show were regarded as lepers by the dysfunctional adults and one another. IIRC devoted an entire episode to revolting smells, such as farts and gym socks.

And yet, there was something about YCDToT that made it easier for me to swallow as a kid. It established its own self-contained universe that felt disconnected and insular, almost dreamlike at the time. Maybe it was just as an unintended consequence of having no outdoor shots and using an unadorned soundstage as the setting for many sketches.