Pranks for the memories

Some jokes just never get old. Which is just as well …

There have been some exciting developments in the field of plastic pooh since last I checked. Where once (i.e. when I was a kid) the only fake pooh you could purchase was the generic coiled doggy doo, you can now get an equally horribly realistic cat poop. You can even pick up (if you’re game) an artfully drooping human-style stool, designed to lie in wait and torment unsuspecting victims from the toilet bowl’s edge.

I can vouch for the convincing qualities of the latter. At a recent family get-together, the kids and I snuck into the loo and installed said pooh as per instructions. We even added a little Vegemite for that extra smear of realism.

Soon after, a relative coyly informed me that one of my children “seems to have had a bit of an accident in the toilet”. It was all fine now, she told me, because she had cleaned up the mess, flicked the offending item into the loo and flushed it away. “They’d tried so hard, and they’d only just missed the bowl,” she said.

This is the danger with practical jokes. You can never be sure which way it will go. In this case - with the kids and me one fake pooh down and our kind-hearted kin more bemused than amused - you could say the result was evenly spread.

At the same social gathering, the kids installed a good old-fashioned plastic doggy doo in the living room, near grandma’s flatulent pooch. This worked so well that the poor dog was banished to the backyard, until we fessed up (but of course, not before a dutiful family member had stooped to scoop the poop).   

In my early parenthood days of messy nappies and even messier potty training, with one hand on a mop and the other clenched round my nostrils, I used to marvel at the sheer volume of all-too-real poohiness one tiny infant bottom could produce.

I remember my beloved remarking at the time that I had to get over my aversion to such messes. This seemed a little unfair, considering I was at the time on my hands and knees in a swamp of liquid faeces. When I could breathe again I advanced the theory that my aversion was in fact quite normal. Unless I had completely misread my fellow man, I was pretty sure I was not alone in being less than adoring of fecal mishaps. It’s not like everybody else loves the stuff. They don’t leap out of bed of a morning thinking “Oh golly, I hope I get to clean up some pooh today”.

If we all loved nothing better than revelling in number twos, then a proud history of practical joking would not exist. We would not have factories in China dedicated to pumping out fake faeces. Like it or not, just as fart jokes will never get old, our comical aversion to anything poohy is nuggety comedy gold.      

I once spent an entire childhood summer saving up for a pooh-inspired product at my local joke shop. It was an aerosol can elaborately labelled Bullshit Spray. Brilliant, I thought. If I could gather enough loose change to purchase this delight, I’d have hours of fun slyly spraying pongs all round the house and watching accusations fly.

You could imagine my disappointment when, having painstakingly scrimped and saved, the first furtive spray of this stuff onto my hand didn’t seem stinky at all. Quite the opposite. It had the reek of a cheap floral air freshener.

It took me the entire trudge home to work out that I’d got things a little muddled. This spray wasn’t meant to smell like pooh. It was for spraying at people who were talking crap. I failed to see the humour in this. I had my heart set on an aerosol spray that smelled like pooh. That was funny. I felt betrayed and foolish. The joke was on me, and it stank.