Slings and Errors: A Brief History of Pee Humor and Expressive Urination

         If you’re keeping up, you now know a lot about Bugs, my high school friend, whose multifarious pranks included peeing on classmates in the locker room shower. Joking or not, Bugs’ antics were way outside the ordinary. But were they abnormal? Let’s discuss.

        “Abnormal” means deviating from the norm, sometimes in unwelcome and problematic ways. Bugs’ behavior surely deviated from the norm, especially among my high school classmates in the 1970s. And while consensual piss play has today been normalized to a degree, peeing on someone without consent—even as a joke—would not be acceptable in any era.

        With that in mind, I want to step back and consider Bugs’ stunt in a larger historical, psychological and sociological context. In truth, urinating for expressive purposes has been documented and even celebrated, often begrudgingly, in virtually every era and place. In short, however weird or abnormal Bugs’ piss play may have appeared, there is precedent.

Eris, goddess of discord

Wisakedjak, the coyote spirit

        “Pee humor” (for lack of a better term) fits within the larger context of humor and mischief that can serve as an engine for societal development and change. People (or gods) who drive societal evolution in this way are sometimes called “tricksters” or “practical jokers”—those impish and sometimes maddening characters who are personified and sometimes even deified. In Norse mythology, Loki was the god of mischief, better known today by Marvel fans as the pain-in-the-ass brother of the thunder god Thor. For the Greeks, it was the goddess of Eris who famously grew to monstrous proportions to vex Hercules by blocking his way. The Chinese had Monkey King, while indigenous tribes like the Algonquin and Cree called him Wisakedjak, the coyote spirit.

        Scholars say a culture’s willingness to tolerate and sometimes celebrate tricksters can be beneficial because mischief and humor help develop and articulate cultural taboos and behavioral boundaries. University of Colorado researchers A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren have proposed that tricksters often act out a “benign violation” of cultural or ethical norms. In their study, participants were presented with “incongruous” behavior, such as a church that sought to boost membership by entering the names of new converts into a raffle. (Interestingly, all participants recognized the incongruity, but only the non-believers thought it was funny.) McGraw and Warren concluded that psychological distance from an incongruous or unpleasant event was necessary for those who saw the humor.

        Of course, the kind of mischief thought to assist societal development is nearly always transgressive, which means that it often rubs some people the wrong way, especially those who are on the receiving end of the joke or prank. This is especially true of urine-related mischief, which can be used to assert power and dominance. “The act of urinating on someone can be seen as a display of dominance, control, or ownership,” according to the webzine NeuroLaunch. “It’s the human equivalent of a lion marking its pride [territory], except with more complicated emotions involved.”

Princess Danaë and the Golden Shower

        Like most things, the Greeks got there first. The technical term for piss play, urolagnia (sexual excitement associated with urine or with urination) derives from the Greek ouron, meaning “urine” and lagneia, meaning “lust.” The Greeks also invented “golden showers,” which appear in Ovid’s retelling of a myth in which Zeus, ever the rascal, impregnates Princess Danaë by appearing to her in a shower of gold. Traditionalists claim that Zeus’ golden shower refers to gold coins or golden rain, which may be true, but it’s impossible to ignore a secondary meaning as a shower or urine or perhaps semen.

        Over time, however, “golden showers” came to refer almost exclusively to showers of urine. For example, readers of the July 1830 edition of the The Owl, a New York periodical, were advised that the “very decent folks who live in Clinton Street … are respectfully requested to desist from causing golden showers to descend from their attic; it is very unpleasant to be caught in one of them.” But the first recorded reference to golden showers as a sex act did not come until 1943 as “a shared act of urine fetishism; the act of urination by one person on another for sexual gratification.” It wasn’t until 1968 that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defined golden showers as “the act of urinating on another person, usually as part of a sex act.”

        By the mid-70s, consensual piss play was becoming a thing, although it generally flew under the radar. At that time, the free-for-all 60s ethos encouraged tolerance for many formerly taboo activities. This hands-off philosophy meant that even those who might not want to pee on anyone generally would not pass judgment on those who did. Different strokes.

Credit: 

• Chris Ferretti 
• Julie Rose Wallach

        This new freedom was celebrated by cultural icons like Xaviera Hollander, a former prostitute and author of the bestselling 1972 memoir “The Happy Hooker,” who wrote that a “famous television producer wants to pay through the nose for what girls do through the bladder—which is otherwise known as ‘the golden shower.’” Much later, piss play was further normalized when rumors surfaced that Donald Trump had hired sex workers to demonstrate golden showers. At that point, the message was clear: No one cares what you do in private so long as it’s consensual.

        Urination has also been used to express rejection, disapproval or annoyance. It's also a way to disrespect of denigrate. In the 1976 film, “W.C. Fields and Me,” Fields (Rod Steiger) is depicted urinating from balcony on people below because he disagrees with their politics. In Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part 1,” a group of prehistoric cave people join an artist as he proudly unveils his newest cave art, which is then dissed by an art critic who pees on it. 

        In more recent films, urination scenes become even more slapstick. In 1993’s “Mrs. Doubtfire,” a divorced husband (Robin Williams) is denied access to his children so he cross-dresses as a nanny for his ex-wife. In one scene, Williams is caught by the children hoisting his/her skirt to pee standing up. And who can forget “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” (played by Steve Carrell) who is depicted shuffling toward the bathroom with a morning erection tenting his boxers. He then is shown sitting on the toilet and spraying misdirected urine onto his face. (For the Top 10 Hilarious Pee Scenes, check out this clip.)

        These insights go a long way toward explaining Bugs’ nonconsensual piss play and, more generally, his need to humiliate people for sport. In a sense, Bugs was always “peeing” on someone because his pranks invariably targeted a particular person or persons who were ridiculed, ostensibly for the entertainment the group, but also for Bugs’ gratification. In a real sense, we were hostages. Bugs held us in his sway, partly by being amusing, but also because anyone who didn’t laugh risked being his next victim.

        But even the most potent spells don’t last forever. Eventually, those who had been pranked by Bugs for more than a decade decided they’d had enough. Bugs’ downfall was quick, merciless and pretty funny.

NEXT: The Reckoning