There is something that I find so irresistibly hilarious about shitting your pants. My friends know that talking about shitting their pants or referencing someone they know shitting their pants is the quickest way to improve my mood. I have so many memories of difficult conversations being punctuated by someone making a joke to me about shitting my or their pants. There are stories peppered throughout my writing that point clearly towards this fixation. Even the term “shitting your pants” makes me laugh out loud. I’m a person.

Many of my critics (family members and friends) think that my obsessive insistence on them telling me their shitting their pants stories is juvenile and disgusting. And they’re right. Knowing that children find jokes about poo funny doesn’t make me feel any better or worse. It is just a natural truth. As natural as shitting your pants is funny. Children finding it funny is basic and understandable and this extends to me.

There are exceptions to this rule, obviously. I don’t think that old people shitting their pants is funny, or people who have suffered from serious medical problems, preventing them from being able to make it to the bathroom in time. I, also, obviously don’t think kids or babies shitting their pants is funny because why would that be funny? If I were to venture a guess to an age where it starts being funny, I’d say teens.

It begins with an innocent ask: “When was the last time you shit your pants?” Most people balk and then tell me they don’t remember. This seems unlikely. But they can at least humour my question and make something up. Or tell me about A time they shit their pants and not necessarily the latest. So many conversations I’ve had at dinner parties have been interrupted by my loudly addressing the table with: Tell me, who here has shit their pants as an adult? I have the sense and wherewithal to wait between courses to inquire. 

My favourite shitting your pants story is my dad’s. He’s never told it to us directly but my mom has on more than one occasion. It makes us laugh so hard. She will tell it when all the girls are together and she’s recounting stories of before me and my older sister were born. It happened at Martha’s Vineyard after my dad lost control of his bowels and didn’t have anywhere to go because the men’s bathrooms were being cleaned. The story is so far-fetched and insane that I have a hard time believing it all went down the way my mom described it. I’m positive she’s embellished parts of the story, even though everything checks out. I’ve never tried to get my dad’s version of the story, as I imagine it’s repressed in the recesses of his heart due to the sheer level of embarrassment he must have felt driving home in a tiny car with his own shit caked to the back of his legs and shorts. But this is what makes these stories so endearing and important to me. 

My second favourite is one of my mom’s friends’ sisters’ that she told us all at dinner one night when I had asked if anyone had any shitting their pants stories. Her sister was a journalist and was on assignment in Zimbabwe. She had been going for runs around the hotel every day and the time it happened she had only been running for a couple of minutes when her stomach flipped and she shit her pants. What makes the story so good is that she was wearing those tighter sweatpants from the 70s that gather at the bottoms with an elastic band. So she’s stuck on her run with shit bunching around both ankles and has to immediately head back to the hotel where there was a security guard and a metal detector machine she needs to walk through in order to reach the privacy of her hotel room. While her ankles are soaked in shit. I think she appealed to the security guard there and he let her walk straight through without any trouble. 

My third favourite is David Sedaris’ entire chapter on shitting his pants in Calypso. I read this at such a formative time in my obsession with shitting your pants stories that I felt like he was addressing me specifically. I remember where I was and what I was doing when I came upon this chapter. I was in the backyard on one of my roommate’s fancy outdoor chairs. I called my dad who had read my copy of the book before me but he didn’t pick up. Probably for the best. I read and laughed outside until the sun dipped behind the buildings around me. I tried to remember the last time I laughed that hard at a book.

I believe all adults I know have a shitting their pants story. All adults have definitely had a near miss but these are not included in my definition. You had to have shit in your pants for it to qualify according to my standards. You had to have gone through the indecency of either cleaning up your own underwear and pants at home or throwing them out while you were on the road. The lucky ones, like myself, have only shit themselves in the safety of their own houses. I have had near misses out in public. I have felt such terrible stomach pains and started sweating out of the blue only to miraculously have my friend find me a public bathroom at the last minute. But no one cares about these stories. They want to hear about the shame and shock you get when you realize you have to shit and there is no way for you to get to the bathroom in time.

I don’t like scenes in movies where people shit their pants. Bridesmaids is the first that comes to mind and it feels overblown and contrived. Like it was shoehorned in for laughs when it was already a funny movie. Movies where people shit their pants are missing a feeling I’m chasing. It feels like you’re getting access to the private room, where no one else is invited. Most people, regardless of how well you know them, feel enough distance from the events (unless they’ve recently happened) that they want to take ownership back over their experience. They realize, like most sane people do, that shitting your pants is objectively one of the funniest, grossest things to happen in one’s adult life, and it’s important to capitalize on how rarely it goes down. Your misery is everyone else’s entertainment. Withholding these stories is cruel and unnecessary. My fuel is pants shitting stories and you are my gas station. 

The most interesting part of the concept of shitting your pants in public, to me, is the logistics of getting home. Do you walk and run the risk of it escaping down your pants? Do you take the subway or subject a poor Uber driver to your predicament? 

I’m respectful when I ask anyone for the first time. Some people don’t feel comfortable enough opening up. Others simply don’t have a story of when they last shit their pants because it’s never happened. I feel sorry for these people, it’s like they’ve never lived. Shitting your pants builds character. It’s humiliating and it equalizes us. I imagine many celebrities have, like me, shit their pants. They’re just too surrounded by yes people and helpers that no one would hear about it. They’d have someone wipe them down with wet wipes and a new pair of pants in minutes. Anyone can shit their pants. This is what’s so beautiful to me.