Poop Talk

Greetings again from the darkness. Poop. Poo, doodie, s**t, feces, excrement, doo-doo, dung, dookie, defecate, bowel movement, and number 2. Director Aaron Feldman threatens to waste (pun) our time by opening on comedians dumping (another one) their various forms of scatological humor. Instead he leaves us a special surprise (!) by creating some kind of docu-comedy on poop that also serves as a bit of an awkward sociological case study.

The surprise here is that the comedians from the opening never stop. They ARE the movie. It's actually 75 minutes of comedians riffing on poop. They tell us their jokes, but more interestingly, they tell us the motivations for this line of humor. Indelicacies and embarrassment are what drives comedy, and I counted 39 different folks providing some insight here. Rather than a rant, it's more of a case study on the realities of why we draw such a hard line between our public persona and the regular (hopefully) occurrence in the privacy (also hopefully) of a bathroom/toilet. Even that last part isn't a given, as the process in other countries like Korea and India is detailed.

The Sklar brothers are Executive Producers and also provide some terrific on screen segments, but the list is too long to name all of the participants - most of whom you will recognize. I've seen some documentaries that might best be labeled as turds, but never one who focuses on that topic. Why is it taboo? Are there differences in how men and women tend to treat this (definitely yes)? The laughs are aplenty and its flush (the last one) with insight from comedians. That's enough reason to sit through this one ... and you won't even need a magazine!

Comedians talking about poop sounded like it was going to be hilarious but it's actually an exercise in paying attention for an hour. At least 25 minutes is youtube videos and doctors explaining poop. And there are actually very few comedians anyway. More than half of them are "comedic" actors that have never done stand up. Of course most of the actual comedians are people who have only had one good hour of material and haven't been funny or relevant for a decade(Pete Holmes, Swardson, Glaser). The most interesting thing about this movie was that Bobby Lee wore a 20 year old MTV shirt with a huge hole in it.

I really wanted to like a DVD about poop, but the stories were of mixed quality and the whole thing was just forced. I couldn't endure more than a half-hour and ejected the disc.

With the names involved, I expected this to be funny, not just a bunch of comedians talking about their unfunny poop stories. That's all they are, stories. No jokes. no humor. Just stories of a pooh they once took.

I have a pretty dark sense of humor and enjoy low brow toilet humour, so this s#!% is right up my alley, only it doesn't deliver. It's a constipation of laughs with diarreah of the mouth.

You can tell this is going to be pretty lame by just knowing even Sarah Silverman isn't in it! That should tell you a lot right there.

Seriously, this is a snore-fest and a waste of time watching. Not one comedian even made me chuckle here, and beleive me I love fart jokes and toilet humour, but there is nothing funny about serious stories of awkward or memorable dumps they once took.