My Funny Lil' Stinker

In the world of comedy, bathroom humor and bodily function noises are the lowest of the low-brow jokes, often reserved as a backup plan for unsuccessful stand-up comedians. The result of using a bathroom joke is typically a cheap laugh and an even cheaper feeling.

The reason for the failure of bathroom humor, in adult audiences, is that it's too basic. It's comedy used in playgrounds across the country, to get elementary school children to giggle. Personally, I think I stopped laughing at fart noises some time after the fourth grade.

That is, until I became a parent.

I don't think I've laughed harder in the last six months, since the arrival of my daughter, than when laughing at the various "body music" that she makes. Babies have no shame and no concept of manners, and I think that's what makes the sporadic ill-timed flatulence or belch so darn funny.

For example, my wife and I exposed our daughter to bottle feedings at an early age so she wouldn't have a problem with them when she was older, and so I could get a chance to feed her occasionally. After one of the first times that I got a chance to give my daughter a bottle, I also got to practice burping her for the first time.

After nearly ten minutes of patting every inch of her back at varying intervals (searching for the magical "burp button") I was about to give up, when I picked her up to my face and started to say, "Well, it looks like you don't have any burps..."

However, that sentence was never completed, because before I could say the word "burp" my daughter let loose a belch that was loud enough and long enough to rival a middle-aged male trucker, AND because of her proximity to my face, I could actually feel the breeze she was producing, which carried upon it the scent that breast milk makes when it meets stomach acid.

And, it was hilarious.

She had burped in my face, and all I could do was laugh hysterically. I actually had to hand her over to my wife, because I was laughing so hard that I didn't think it was safe to continue holding her. She's a baby, what else could I do? There was no point in getting angry or disgusted, so I laughed.

On another occasion, I had gotten up with my wife for a late-night/early-morning, to keep her company (read: sleep) on the couch while she nursed the baby. Since I lack the necessary equipment for breastfeeding, I usually tried to at least help out by changing my daughter's diaper before my wife fed her.

On this particular night/morning, as soon as I opened my daughter's diaper, she let out what I can only describe as a "sneeze" from her butt, which resulted in a spray of liquid poop getting on everything south of the changing table, including her crib, Diaper Genie, and walls. (Yes, the walls!)

I practically fell over laughing.

In fact, I was so busy laughing at my daughter's "talent" that I almost forgot to close her diaper back up before "round two".

After she was done, I changed her diaper, handed her off to my wife, and spent the next twenty minutes cleaning up the "splatter paint" my daughter had chosen to decorate her walls with, laughing especially hard when I would find a new spot in a hard-to-reach location.

Based on my daughter's gaseous abilities, my wife and I thought it only fitting that this year, for our daughter's first Halloween, she go dressed as a skunk. In fact, the picture at the top of this post is the exact costume that we got for her. It's actually called the Lil' Stinker.

So, while I don't think all bathroom humor and bodily functions are funny any more, I will continue to, for now, find the humor in a long audible fart from my daughter, during a break in the conversation at dinnertime.

Besides, all of these stories will be great for "embarrassing story time" when she's a teenager.