Toilet Humour: the Illicit Campus Art

Graffiti - it's more than vandalism, it's self-expression

One joke smith responded: “Plastic surgery!”

A second, equally flippant responder volunteered: “You hit them hard in the face. And scream…”

Which, in turn, provoked a very British rejoinder: “I don’t think the answer to any question of etiquette is to hit people in the face.”

Another response (there were more than ten in total) enquired back: “Urgent? Were you writing this while having sex with / talking to someone?”

Now seems the time to divulge the identity of that which I have referred to as a “chat room”. Not so much a log-in-log-out chat room of the online-forum kind, but a real physical platform on which people have been writing up their thoughts, and receiving responses…

Possibly if you are a female reader you will have come across this secret seminar. Most likely – and hopefully – as a male reader, you will not have. This is because the location of said discussion is the wall of one of the cubicles in the Vanbrugh ladies’ loos next the famed “Sociology degree, please take one” loo roll dispenser.

Now it seems a fair assumption to say that the initial remark was written in jest. The idea that such a question, asked in such a setting could possibly be “urgent” is ludicrous, as has already been pointed out by graffiti remark No 4. The risibly unlikely juxtaposition of situations during which the writer of the initial “urgent question” suffers her tired out partners, adding further absurd humour to the round-table.

It also seems worth noting, that when in the bathroom in Vanbrugh, one inevitably has to wait longer for this cubicle. People are in there either reading the wall with all the avidity that would ordinarily be saved for one’s Facebook newsfeed – or a JSTOR article – or people are in there adding their own advice to the wall.

This got my mind working thinking about graffiti. It's a word that evokes images of criminal, psychedelic, spray-canned street-paintings of great, warped gangsters and profanities. If you look up graffiti on dictionary.com, the example sentence they give you reads:

“These graffiti are evidence of the neighbourhood’s decline.”

The OED is just as up-to-date with the social implications of the word, defining it:

“Unauthorized writing or drawings on a surface in a public place.”

However, older definitions of graffiti don’t necessarily hold with these ASBO-generation implications. The word “graffiti”, which we use indiscriminately as an all encompassing verb/noun, is in fact the plural of the noun “graffito”, coming from the Italian “graffio”, meaning “a scratch or scribble”. Famous, ancient cave paintings such as those in the Lascaux caves in France can also be termed graffiti, as can the inscriptions discovered in 1851 in the ruins of Pompeii.

Winston Churchill, who was predicted by his teachers to get nowhere in life, famously carved his name on the wall at school. Whilst it hasn’t yet lasted as long as the French cave paintings or Pompeian inscriptions, the carving is still there more than 100 years later. In fact, since he went on to prove his teachers wrong, Churchill’s carving became the start of a school tradition, as every pupil’s name is carved onto wooden boards on the when they leave.

Even now, not all graffiti is as the dictionary would have us think of it. Anyone not heard of Banksy? The Bristolian graffiti artist’s paintings are archetypal in their subject matters and their public canvases, but are so distinct in their clean-line stencilled execution that they surpass traditional free-style graffiti. Banksy’s motifs have been printed onto T-Shirts, published in coffee-table books, and most ironically, copied onto canvases (surely totally at-odds with what graffiti is?)

Ed Hardy too takes graffiti to the next level – or is it the previous level? – printing a combination of tattoo style and graffiti-style art work onto his clothing collections.

Whilst distasteful slogan T-Shirts are still being sported by some, the “urgent question” printed on the Vanbrugh bathroom wall will probably not make it that far, although it has made it as far as this article, so anything could happen.

To finish with, one final response on the Vanbrugh bathroom wall:

“Jeez guys! You should at least write in pencil so it can be rubbed off!!!

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