The Scatological Imagination in Japanese Humour – Laughter, transgression and base materialism in the representations from farts to sewer and toilets

The scatological imagination is a fundamental element in the development of the humanity’s sense of humour, which can be seen all around the world and date back to ancient times. As its case study, I explore the Japanese sense of humour that revolves around excretion, including farts, toilets, sewers and excrement. I draw on several works that have inspired me in formulating this research, ranging from traditional Japanese imagery to contemporary comedy and visual culture. More specifically, I will discuss following examples: the sketch piece Kōjō No Tsuki/The Moon Over the Ruined Castle (1999) by the comedy duo Downtown which depicts an elderly couple living in the sewer and kidnapping children who come to use the toilet, in order to form a musical band; the scroll painting He-gassen/Fart Competition (12th century) which depicts people competing with each other ingeniously in a farting contest; the music video trilogy Denki Groove Anniversary Song – 32nd, 34th and 35th (2024) and Toshio Matsumoto’s experimental film Metastasis (1971), both of which expresses toilet existentialism through psychedelic visualisation. Their works have a rebellious humour that transforms the grotesque, nonsense and negative connotations of excretion into critical commentary; they mock and challenge the biopolitical parameters that control, hide and demonise excreta and conceptualise it as ‘waste’ or ‘excess’ that must be nullified. In these works, I explore the place where scatological humour gains the transgressive power to challenge the ideology of normalisation that aims to invent the idea of the human as a disembodied, aseptic entity.

Since the Enlightenment, which initiated the reasoning and disciplining of all aspects of people’s lives on a nationwide scale, the biological nature of human beings has been detached from social and psychological reality, rendered invisible under the organisation of infrastructure. It encloses individual lives in the ‘clarity’ of the Cartesian mind, driven by reason, with an agency of free will—Nothing escapes this self-induced intelligibility (not even a fart). Anything that escapes this disembodied, transcendental space of the mind is regarded as surplus or excess, to be controlled. In modernity, this is where psychoanalysis comes in, reminding us that the subject fails not only physically with farts, poops, burps, nocturnal emissions, but also mentally with slips of the tongue, dreams and jokes. The encounter with excretory phenomena exposes the uncontrollable in our lives, the fissure between zoe and bios, between our social and biological beings. This fissure manifests in our psyche accompanying a sense of embarrassment and shame. Not to mention Sigmund Freud’s famous theory of anal stage and eroticism resulted from failure in controlling the excretory activities, the psychoanalysis attempts to process the scatological imagination as a pathological ‘illness’ to be cured and managed. In the Western context, a number of avant-gardes figures of the early 20th century, most prominently such as French thinker Georges Bataille, strategically employed social and religious taboos, such as abnormal sex, homosexuality, death, violence, and eroticism involving the scatological, to restore the transgressive and blasphemous power of imagination that had long been suppressed by Christianity. The scatological impulses, curiosity and imagination explored by these thinkers have been mostly discussed, or rather ‘diagnosed’ in relation to abnormal sexuality, drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis which push them into the pathological domain of medical observation and analysis. In my discussion, I intend to move away from this pathologising forces with regard to the scatological, as it diminishes the social and cultural significance of the scatological laughter. Scatological laughter reminds us of the biological entity within us, of our powerlessness and its absurdity in the face of the force of nature. I would rather discuss it as the humanity’s endless endeavour to build a relationship with the uncontrollable in nature, and as an intervention in our totalising desire to control every aspect of our lives, to be prolonged, extracted and exploited, into a profitable labour and commodity. Drawing on the idea of ‘the restoration of the anus’ by the Japanese scholarly scatologue Minoru Yamada, I explore the symbolic function of excretion as a form of rebellion/protest and the scatological sense of humour as a laxative to stimulate our mental metabolic process of digesting our violent realities.

The Online Research and Writing Workshop on Japanese Humour and Comedy, Organised by Dr Richard Talbot (University of Salford) and Dr Till Weingärtner (University College Cork), 20th & 27th June 2025.

• Organisation