More Stuff About Poop (and the Waltons)

You know, now that I’ve posted that last bit about THE POOPY CHAIR, it makes me wonder why there isn’t more attention devoted to the comic potential of crap-fouled pipes on TV sitcoms. I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing the Waltons never talked about last thing of a evenin' before they participated in their three-hour bedtime ritual of naming one another until they went mad. Well, except for that one time John, Sr. came home at 4 AM ripped to the tits on rotgut and some morphine he'd bought off Red Turner. Remember that one? Dear ol' Dad shat into the sink and blocked it clean shut with his opiated leavings, causing the dishwater to overflow the next morning, and he blamed it on John-Boy and beat his ass with a belt, saying he was such a lazy good-for-nothing piece of shanty Irish shit that he'd let his whole family drown rather than clean out the pipes like he'd been told to, and yes, he was shanty Irish, Pa hadn't even been in town from winter '15 to February '16, and he could count. It wasn't Pa's fault that Ma couldn't keep her skirt down whenever one of those dumb Paddys came around with a sob story and a half-pint of Jamesons'. Hell, John-Boy's real daddy could have been any one of two or three dozen dirty good-for-nothing Micks who weren't smart enough to take down their pants before they pissed. 

 And then John-Boy looked in the mirror and realized that he really was a half-pogue bastard, and he ran off to join the Army so he could get killed and hide his shame from the world. Yeah, anyway, on that one they did briefly talk about pipes clogged up with shit right at the end, when Mary Ellen remarked that in all the hullaballoo about John-Boy being a no-good turf-cutting half-shant jackeen narrowback, no one had remembered to pull the turd out of the sink. (They eventually made Jason do it, which is why he caught cholera and sickened half the town before dying, alone, in a shack outside of Richmond where no one knew him, which is also why he never lived to see the halfwit son he'd sired on his own sister Erin*.) 

That sure was a good episode. End of season 4, I think. I always wondered why people made such a fuss about All in the Family being controversial when on the same network you had gritty stuff like this broadcast every week.

*According to Camille Paglia’s Television and Sexuality: The Apollonian/Dionysian Disconnect in American TV Characters of the 1970s, the name “Erin”, being the Gaelic name for “Ireland”, is an encoded message to the viewer that Mrs. Walton had, once again, been screwing the shanty Irish at the time of Erin’s conception. Paglia is said to have hated the show, but that didn't stop her from devoting 50,000 words (mostly rude ones) to it in her still-unpublished behemoth of a first doctoral dissertation.