Latest / Privycast / Ep. 163 Bathroom Scares and the Psychology of Prank Scares
Transcript
- 0:00That's extreme.
- 0:01Now if you've got diarrhea, like diarrhea happens.
- 0:05It happens to the best of us.
- 0:08But you gotta know you, you know?
- 0:17Welcome back to privy privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
- 0:25I'm your host Hunter Hoover and I love bathrooms.
- 0:30Welcome back everyone.
- 0:31At the point of this episode's released you have survived prank season.
- 0:37Happy April.
- 0:40Normally when we close out the month of March we begin looking at a variety of
- 0:46bathroom pranks to gear us up for pranking season at the beginning of April.
- 0:53That said, OWWA is currently traveling and I did not want to deal with an abundance of new bathroom pranks as I'm going to be busy enough.
- 1:05Sorry kids, leave me alone.
- 1:08But it's pranking season or at least it was.
- 1:12And in the past, we've looked at a number of pranks and you know what?
- 1:15I'm going to be honest with you.
- 1:16Every year I make a comment about how like, don't actually know if anybody's doing April Fool's pranks.
- 1:23And then every year I got somebody that tries to April Fool's pranks me.
- 1:30Like leave me alone.
- 1:31I'm an adult.
- 1:32I'm an old man.
- 1:34You're going to harm me pranking me with your ne'er do well nonsense.
- 1:41And we've looked at a number of bathroom pranks and I think what's happened is in looking at these
- 1:46I've actually inadvertently or maybe on purposely, I went back and listened to one of these pretty heinous ideas that I have put forth into the world.
- 1:55But I think what it really is, is it's just giving like punk, but teens firepower to levy against the teachers, adults, parents, and the people in their lives via bathroom
- 2:09shenanigans.
- 2:11And we've talked a lot of bathroom pranks since the start of this show.
- 2:16upper deckers, fake soap, pee pee traps, cellophane gags, dyed shampoo to dye your hair, poopy porch bombs.
- 2:26There's truly been no shortage to ways that you can prank some.
- 2:31Feel free to go back and listen to any number of our April Fool's Day prank related episodes if you want a treat or maybe some ideas for next year.
- 2:42And this year for April Fool's Day,
- 2:46or at least in, we're getting close and I mean we're within the ballpark.
- 2:49We're four days off.
- 2:51It's the fifth.
- 2:52We are not going to be looking at pranks this year.
- 2:55Rather, we are going to be exploring an idea that I believe is prank adjacent.
- 3:03I think every good prank when you prank somebody, pranked, it's nice to be able to revel in the prank.
- 3:11You know, you gag some, not gag them, dear Lord.
- 3:15Help us all.
- 3:16Forgive us, Father.
- 3:17We've strayed far from you.
- 3:19But you pull a goof on somebody, and part of the joy of the goof is you get to kind of sit in the goof for a little bit.
- 3:28I sit in my goof regularly.
- 3:31Sometimes I goof myself really hard, and I just have to sit and just sit in the goof for a minute.
- 3:37And I was going through comments on Spotify, and we're going to get to more of those comments at the end of the show.
- 3:44But one of the comments that was on actually last year's privy pranks episode was to rub hot sauce on somebody's bar soap.
- 3:52Now, I would even argue you could get away with deodorant.
- 3:55Now, let me tell you something.
- 3:57It's very adjacent.
- 3:58And thank you, America.
- 3:59I think it was America for posting that on Spotify.
- 4:01Thank you for putting that out there.
- 4:03I'm not going to say.
- 4:04It's very close.
- 4:05It's very similar.
- 4:06A few years back, we said rub icy hot or ben gay, as the kids call it.
- 4:11on someone's bathroom products.
- 4:14But man, hot sauce is pretty diabolical.
- 4:17Like, depending on the hot sauce, you could do some serious damage.
- 4:20Like, if you get hot sauce in your eyes, it can be game over jelly.
- 4:24Like, yeah.
- 4:25Prank!
- 4:26But this year's prank, and it's a prank in quotation marks because it's not exactly a prank per se.
- 4:34And I'm gonna explain, before we get into this phenomenon.
- 4:38I want to explain why I specifically want to talk about this.
- 4:45Recently, my internet scrolling, my doom scrolling, the 20 minutes of doom scrolling I do a day, has been littered with scare videos.
- 4:55Now what I mean by this, this is not videos that scare me.
- 4:59These are videos where I get to enjoy somebody scaring someone else.
- 5:04It's a treat.
- 5:06It's always a good time to see these scare prank prank videos.
- 5:12It's videos of people getting scared and kind of what I want to explore here.
- 5:16And we're gonna get to the bathroom, I promise.
- 5:18We're in the bathroom.
- 5:19We're gonna get to the bathroom is the topic too.
- 5:21But I want to explore why these videos are so funny.
- 5:25Like, they're just hilarious.
- 5:28And it begs a question.
- 5:30Why is people getting scared so funny?
- 5:34Like, what is it about people getting hoogity dang old boogity that just brings me such delight?
- 5:42It's not even a prank.
- 5:44It takes very little planning.
- 5:46It's not even that high brow of a thing to do.
- 5:49Yet, here I am laughing hysterically at people getting scared.
- 5:54Now, I'll also say, if I get scared, I get so mad.
- 5:59Like, it makes me angry.
- 6:01I get triggered.
- 6:04There's people's reactions and there's some classic like on TikTok, there's a number of classic scares.
- 6:10Like you have your characters truly.
- 6:13There's the lady that pees her pants.
- 6:15We're going to talk about that.
- 6:16There's the thick gentlemen.
- 6:18We're going to talk about him.
- 6:19And then there's the like, the ones that are really good are the people that like lay on the floor, like right outside the bathroom.
- 6:26And when people come out of the bathroom, it's just their head like on the floor staring up at them and they just bug out like
- 6:33These people come out of their skin because this person is laying there.
- 6:37And I gotta explore why is it so funny when it pisses me off so bad when I get scared?
- 6:44why is the bathroom so often so associated with scaring and pranking?
- 6:53What is it about this space?
- 6:55Here we are.
- 6:57Here's the, I'm gonna turn you here for a second.
- 7:01There's all them toilet papers.
- 7:02know, last month we closed out the month with an episode of Ranked and man, I still have a lot of toilet paper to use.
- 7:10We're gonna be working on the leftovers of that Ranked toilet paper for a while, I'll tell you that.
- 7:16There's one universal rule for people when they are scaring this pranking season.
- 7:24And that is this.
- 7:25People have a number of reactions to
- 7:29being scared.
- 7:31Some are fleers.
- 7:33This is the flight part of the fight or flight.
- 7:37But then there's those that are just going to start swinging.
- 7:40These are our fighters.
- 7:41And when you go to scare somebody, it is important to maybe have done enough market research about who you're scaring to know if you need to give them space to run or if you
- 7:53need to improve your dodging skills.
- 7:56Even funnier though,
- 7:57and much more bathroom related, I might add, is that sometimes the people who are scared just totally pee or poo themselves when they get scared.
- 8:10When this happens, and it's like, well, why?
- 8:12Like you get scared, but like, why'd you crap your pants?
- 8:17there's nothing wrong, like it's fine, Linda.
- 8:20Just hold your diarrhea through the scare.
- 8:23You know what saying?
- 8:24Like.
- 8:25If you can't like sphincter sec it through the scare, I think you need to like give yourself some practice or something.
- 8:35don't know.
- 8:35But when you get scared, it activates a fight or flight response in you as I stated.
- 8:43And when that fight or flight response is activated in you, your bladder contracts to prepare for the fight.
- 8:53And in some people's case, that pelvic floor, that's the floor of the zone down there, the downstairs zone, it loosens up.
- 9:05Now don't know why your pelvic floor would loosen up if you're scared, if your bladder's contracting, why would your pelvic floor loosen up?
- 9:13I don't know.
- 9:15Like, I don't know.
- 9:18But when these two things combine, when your bladder contract and your pelvic floor loosens, they can result in rigorous leakage, also known as completely whizzing yourself.
- 9:35It's a tough look, and it's an even tougher look when your friends upload that to the internet for others to laugh at.
- 9:43From what I can tell based on these TikTok videos that I've been watching and from what I can tell based off of just my basic Googling and searching for this episode, people peeing
- 9:55their pants when they're scared happens a lot more than you might think, like way more.
- 10:02Like I was baffled by how much more it happens.
- 10:07And while pee is more likely to occur in these instances,
- 10:12especially in good old fashioned prank scaring.
- 10:15Like it should be noted that in severe cases, a person can poop themselves chas royale if the fear and anxiety they are experiencing is so great.
- 10:28Here's what I wanna say.
- 10:29If a person craps their pants off of a basic, just some casual daytime prank scaring, there's something going on there.
- 10:39Like they might need counseling.
- 10:41I'm just gonna say it.
- 10:42Because I'm not convinced that casual daytime prank scaring should scare you to the point where you incontinent your butthole and poop your pants.
- 10:53Like, that's extreme.
- 10:54Now if you've got diarrhea, like diarrhea happens.
- 10:58It happens to the best of us.
- 11:01But you gotta know you, you know?
- 11:03Like you gotta know what you're working with.
- 11:05And hopefully the people in your life that may or may not be scaring you, hopefully they'll be acquainted with you
- 11:11to know that, yes, yes, they're a diarrhea, they're a diarrhea sufferer, and I ought to take their diarrhea into consideration before I prank scare them.
- 11:21Just scare the mud pie right out of these people.
- 11:24But with all these dangers in mind, peeing yourself, pooping yourself, getting swaying on, like, why is it so funny?
- 11:32Like, why is it so funny when people get scared?
- 11:35What makes it so entertaining when people get scared?
- 11:49And there's a number of theories here, some of which I personally think are just stupid nonsense.
- 11:55One theory that I want to rule out right away is sadism.
- 11:58This just says that like, people scare people because they're awful and they like to torture others.
- 12:05I don't think so.
- 12:06I don't think that's why people do this.
- 12:08I don't think that people scare people simply because they're jerks and they just like to make people feel bad.
- 12:14I don't think that's why it's funny either.
- 12:16Like,
- 12:17When I laugh at somebody just getting freaked, I don't laugh because I'm like, you yes, you sick urchin, no.
- 12:25I think part of it is this.
- 12:28We have all been there.
- 12:30We have all been on the receiving end of the prank scare.
- 12:34And as a result, it's funny to see someone else be there when we are not the receiver.
- 12:43It's kind of like, you know, it's like misery loves company.
- 12:46It's a shared experience.
- 12:48And you vicariously through this person are like, yes, I have been scared and I've felt just as triggered as you do right now.
- 12:58It's kind of a shared experience.
- 13:00To that regard, watching somebody get scared is kind of like, like ripping a good beaver, like, like just tooting off a nice fart and you know, sharing that sharing that smell with
- 13:12people like.
- 13:13It's kind of like a good fart or a long turd.
- 13:15Like it ought to be observed and enjoyed by the collective.
- 13:19Collective turd viewing brought to a bathroom stall near you.
- 13:22And I think part of this is just seeing the person's reaction.
- 13:27And I think we laugh at their reaction because we know our reaction would be and probably has been in the past something that others are going to laugh at as well.
- 13:37It's a shared experience.
- 13:39People getting scared is funny because it's surprising.
- 13:43There's a big payoff to the scare.
- 13:45Like, and usually when it's framed right, you know, like the person's in hiding and you can see the hiding and you know somebody's gonna get just absolutely spooked on.
- 13:55And then when it happens, it's like this big release, you know, it's like, yes, there it is.
- 14:02Seeing people get scared is funny because we aren't the ones getting scared.
- 14:08We are safe and that's important.
- 14:11I think you could make a
- 14:13Argument for all pranks on that pranks are funny Because when someone else is getting pranked usually we are not I think it's also true of farts Don't think about it too much
- 14:22another clear reason why this stuff is funny is The way which we have been there again.
- 14:29We've all been scared We've all had someone stand behind a door or lay on the floor in waiting to pop out and spook us as we get ready to walk pot
- 14:39and get mad and we know the emotions that we have to those things.
- 14:44And so when we see those emotions play out in others, we're like, yes, we have been on the receiving end too.
- 14:50And I know how you feel.
- 14:51And so we can begin to get a grasp on why the prank scare really any prank, but specifically the scare is so funny.
- 15:00But now on the tail end of our episode and perhaps maybe in the context of our episode here on a bathroom podcast,
- 15:09We need to have a conversation about like, what is it with the bathroom and the space in this room and the things that go on here?
- 15:20What is it about the bathroom that attracts scares?
- 15:24And what is it about the bathroom that attracts pranking?
- 15:29Something that I've noticed since when we did our movie scenes in the bathroom, we've done a couple of these and there's two genres of film.
- 15:39that rely heavily on the bathroom as like, this is a touch point for this genre.
- 15:47Comedy and horror.
- 15:49When I watch videos of people getting scared, so many of them happen in the bathroom.
- 15:56And when you watch a scare prank video, it's kind of the melding of comedy and horror.
- 16:02Like somebody's getting scared and I am laughing at
- 16:07And so Hollywood understands that the bathroom space, there's something inherently like spookable to it, accompanied by the reality that there's much potential for humor out of
- 16:20this space.
- 16:21And when I watch these videos, so many of them happen in the bathroom.
- 16:25One of my particular favorites, so I told you there's a number of like regular prank scare characters and then they pop up and as soon as you see these
- 16:34These lovable friends are just like, I know exactly what I'm getting ready to get.
- 16:38But there's this one guy, he's a bigger dude.
- 16:41He's a pretty big, he's thick.
- 16:44He's a full-bodied boy.
- 16:45That's what they called me in eighth grade, full-bodied boy.
- 16:48But it's this big British guy.
- 16:50And when this guy gets scared, he just whooshes his neck.
- 16:55I hurt myself doing it.
- 16:57He whips his neck back so fast.
- 17:00Like he just, I mean, it just.
- 17:02And there's no way that this is anything but like his reflexes to being scared.
- 17:08Like truly, it's just so violent.
- 17:11And sometimes when he does that, it looks like he's breaking his neck.
- 17:15Like he gets so scared that it looks like he breaks his neck.
- 17:18And it's wild to see this.
- 17:20But one of the best of the prank scare videos involving this gentleman is the, is he sitting on the toilet and somebody scares him and he just.
- 17:28gets scared so bad that his neck just goes full giraffe neck, just wha-pah, just flips that joker back and his phone goes flying.
- 17:37I mean, where's it at?
- 17:39It's probably stuck in his ceiling.
- 17:41He skeeted that phone so fast into the ceiling.
- 17:45It was wild.
- 17:46Now, I don't think it got stuck, but still.
- 17:48And there's so many scares that happen in the bathroom.
- 17:52Why is the bathroom such a trap for scaring people?
- 17:57And if you think about it,
- 17:59It seems to me that every culture has a scary story or some sort of lore or some sort of, you know, strange myth that takes place in the bathroom.
- 18:16Ghost stories, Bloody Mary, drain monsters, and for that matter, drain monsters and all these things.
- 18:23Why bathrooms?
- 18:24Because like kitchens have drains.
- 18:28Like you could have a hoogity boogity come out of your drain in the kitchen.
- 18:32Why has it got to come out of the bathroom?
- 18:34What is it about bathrooms that attract scary scenes, scary stories, jump scares, and are often coupled with mass goofy hilarity as well?
- 18:46And to that I have to say it has a lot to do with vulnerability.
- 18:51Same with dark.
- 18:53When you walk into a dark room, you don't know what you're going to get there.
- 18:56You don't know what's in the room.
- 18:57The room is dark.
- 18:58You don't know what's in it.
- 19:00As a result, simply by the rules of the game, you are vulnerable.
- 19:05You can't see well.
- 19:06You don't know what's going to happen.
- 19:08Now that vulnerability in your brain.
- 19:11I want you to take a moment and name for me a more vulnerable room in your house than your bathroom.
- 19:19Like it's the most vulnerable spot in your in your home in any building almost, I would say.
- 19:28Like in your bathroom, you regularly strip down buff, 100 % buffy the clean toilet slayer.
- 19:36In the bathroom, you find yourself in the most vulnerable positions you're going to find yourself in.
- 19:43Two key vulnerable positions that you will find yourself in, I would say frequently in the bathroom, number one, all sub-soaped up and nowhere to run.
- 19:54Like you have fully lathered it.
- 19:58Like you're just head, knees and toes lathered and the spook comes.
- 20:05Like it doesn't, where are you going to go?
- 20:08Where are you going to go?
- 20:10Your little digits hanging out and you're all soaked up.
- 20:13Like where are you going?
- 20:14You're vulnerable.
- 20:16And the second is dropping Chaz Royale just pants at the ankle, mid-deuce.
- 20:22It's vulnerable.
- 20:25And as a result,
- 20:26People begin to let their guard down or they take the safety of the room a little bit for granted because it's their space.
- 20:36It's your inner sanctum.
- 20:37It's your sanctum of stank.
- 20:39It's your stanktum.
- 20:41TM, TM, TM, stanktum.
- 20:43Enter the stanktum.
- 20:45gosh, what a great idea.
- 20:46Enter my stanktum.
- 20:48Welcome to my, welcome to my stanktum.
- 20:52Welcome to the inner stanktom.
- 20:54The inner stanktom.
- 20:56Stanktom, stanktom.
- 20:57I think that's why way back in the day when Olin Rogers was doing his like stories, he did the story Ghosts and the Stalls.
- 21:05I think that's why he got such a big response from that dude out of Target.
- 21:08Because the guy thought he was safe in there.
- 21:10It's funny.
- 21:11When we're in the bathroom, that vulnerability and sense of safety in the space is played on to result in some awesome scares.
- 21:22And I'm convinced.
- 21:24Like, I'm convinced that that's why there's so many of these bathroom pranks and bathroom scares and scare pranks.
- 21:32It's classic stuff.
- 21:33But it's that way because the bathroom is so vulnerable and we let our guard down.
- 21:39Another good reason, and I'm convinced, is mirrors.
- 21:41Like, mirrors increase the hoogity boogityness of a room.
- 21:46Mirrors have a way of playing tricks on us and we often hold this belief
- 21:52that if we can see, like I can see this mirror right now and I can see what's in it.
- 21:56But I'll tell you, if somebody popped out stage right and I'm like, gosh, it's gonna do me in.
- 22:02Like I'm gonna freak out.
- 22:04Mirrors have a way of playing tricks on us because we hold this belief that if we could see the mirror for me, this is how Hunter's brain works.
- 22:12If I can see the mirror, I'm more safe than I was.
- 22:16But the trouble is, is that's a false sense of security.
- 22:19someone boosts in destroys the charade and the scare is even worse.
- 22:23Normally for April Fool's Day, we set up pranks and jokes to gag one another.
- 22:28I gotta quit saying gag one another.
- 22:32But it turns out the elaborate prank may really be overkill for what you need to do to be a prankster this year.
- 22:39Turns out you can just pop out, yell hoogity dang old boogity and spook someone when they don't expect it and do it in and around or outside the bathroom.
- 22:47Turns out.
- 22:48It has maximum effect.
- 22:49It's a pretty good place for it.
- 22:52If you decide to do that and you're like, oh man, I'm going to scare somebody outside the bathroom and scare them really bad, try to film it.
- 22:58Send it to us.
- 22:59We'd love to see that.
- 23:00We might even share it on our socials and tag you and make sure everything's kosher in that regard, but it would be funny.
- 23:08Share it out on the privies.
- 23:09It's Facebook group.
- 23:10It's open.
- 23:10You can go join it, the privies.
- 23:13Plenty of bathroom memes are shared there.
- 23:15If you like poop humor and bathroom humor and silly bathroom ideas and inventions and goofiness, the privies you could do much worse.
- 23:25This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
- 23:38Here at the end of the episode, I wanted to read a listener submitted comment.
- 23:43So this listener left a comment on one of our bathroom episodes and he asked what my earliest bathroom memory was.
- 23:52So Marika asked, what's your earliest bathroom memory?
- 23:55And man, you know, it's tough.
- 23:59I thought about this for the last couple of days.
- 24:01I like, what is my earliest bathroom memory?
- 24:03Like, and two things came to mind.
- 24:06And I know these are not my first bathroom experiences because like I don't remember being potty trained.
- 24:12Like I know that I am because I don't poop my pants regularly.
- 24:18two memories.
- 24:19Number one is I remember, I don't remember how old I was, but I remember getting the stomach flu really bad when I was in grade school.
- 24:28And I remember like half sleeping, like living next to the toilet.
- 24:33I got the stomach flu a lot growing.
- 24:36Like, I had a sensitive stomach, I think.
- 24:40Which is weird because nowadays I seem to just do whatever I want.
- 24:43But I remember just like, almost sleeping on the floor in the bathroom, just holding on for dear life with the tummy rumbles in the upchucked city.
- 24:53The other memory that I have though is one time I was tasked by my mother doing dishes in the home of clearing the table.
- 25:01And there was this pot and in my brain it was soup.
- 25:05and it had like, you know, vegetables and all sorts of stuff in it.
- 25:08And I'm sitting here like, I'm looking at this pot that's, it's got a substantial amount of fluid in it.
- 25:14And I'm like, I don't know what to do with this.
- 25:16Like, I'm gonna go outside, it's cold.
- 25:18And so instead of like draining off the liquid and then scooping the vegetables in the trash, which is now I know what it is, as a grown adult, I know is the solution to this
- 25:27problem.
- 25:28Like I've solved the riddle.
- 25:29I elected to take the entire pot to the bathroom and
- 25:33dump it all in the toilet and then flush that down the toilet.
- 25:38I was explained by my mother that this is not a thing that I should do.
- 25:43But that's one of my earliest bathroom memories.
- 25:45There's a picture of me and my cousins in the bathtub together back when our parents were trying to get us all to get chicken pox from each other.
- 25:53Back when that was the guidance from the doctors.
- 25:56It's like, yeah, they got chicken pox.
- 25:58Make sure that they go like.
- 25:59like dog pile their cousin with chicken pox that way they can all get it and now we can get shingles so that's cool.
- 26:04But yeah, earliest bathroom memory probably the soup disaster would be the most one that lives in my brain.
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- 27:38Probably missing something.
- 27:39Sticker mule stickers are still out there if you want to order some stickers.
- 27:43I have a number of cool stickers that we have designed over the course of this show.
- 27:47And if you want those to just rep the show in some way, there's a sticker mule store.
- 27:52Feel free to hop on there and click around and order some stickers.
- 27:56I think you have to buy like 10, but you know, it's like a dollar for a sticker.
- 28:01That's what I think when it comes out too.
- 28:02So check that out.
- 28:04Yeah.
- 28:04Thank you so much for being here.
- 28:05Thank you for listening.
- 28:07Careful pranking each other, don't scare each other too bad this season.
- 28:10This brings us to the end of another episode of privy.
- 28:13Thanks again for being here.
- 28:14Keep pooping in the free world.
- 28:16Own your stank.
- 28:17And now, as always, don't forget to flush.