Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Childhood innocence
A school in Sweden is planning to install a musical toilet for its students. On glancing at the relevant news report, I assumed they were doing it to help constipated children evacuate their bowels. My old circus buddy, Smacker Ramrod, told me how listening to Mozart or Perry Como would relax his sphincter and loosen the granite-like dung clogging up his innards. Given that human kiddies are notorious for not eating their veggies and detesting fibre-rich food, it’s highly plausible that many of them face a life-or-death struggle when attempting to eject their faecal waste. If music can help them poop it out, so much the better.
Yet on studying the news report more carefully, it soon became apparent that constipation was not the problem that inspired this innovation. The purpose of the music, in fact, is to drown out any noises made by the toilet-user. It seems that Swedish children are incredibly embarrassed about the sounds they make and don’t want anyone outside the toilet to hear them. I must say I find this quite astonishing. The human children I encountered in my circus days loved making lavatory noises, which they frequently imitated by sticking out their tongues and blowing. The sound of an authentic fart invariably produced great merriment among them. I have no doubt they would have despised the musical toilet as device for weaklings and cry-babies.
Have human children really changed so much since the days I used to associate with them? Or is there a particular problem with Swedish children, who may have been taught that farting is shameful? There’s a big difference, of course, between getting laughs for an imitation fart and getting laughed at for a real one. But I don’t believe children are born with an embarrassment about breaking wind. This can only be a complex giving to them by adults. I should imagine politically correct Swedish parents are giving their children hard stares and forcing them to apologise for their flatulence. This will be very damaging in the long run. A nation that is ashamed of its farts is a nation of sissies.
If I were a schoolteacher in Sweden, I would tell the children that big animals don’t care about the noises they make when they go to the bathroom. I’ve laughed at elephants shitting, I’ve laughed at hippos shitting, and d’ya know what? They never even looked in my direction. That’s what it means to be a big beast. You do whatever you want and don’t worry about the audience reaction. No amount of cackling and hooting is going to make an elephant feel embarrassed.
Anyone who stands outside a toilet hoping to hear amusing noises is an idiot and a buffoon. That’s really scraping the barrel for cheap laughs. Why go to the trouble of making a musical toilet to thwart such people? You may as well make a toilet that makes continuous fart noises to drown out the sound of fart noises. That, I admit, would be pretty funny.
Labels: farting, Farts, flatulence, human kiddies, mockery, musical toilet
