"The Sacred and The Shit are subject to very similar taboos. They are both untouchable and must not be named. They both inhabit a special realm beyond the everyday. Accordingly, the excrements of holy people are charged with special meaning. There is a myth according to which the Dalai Lama’s shit was traditionally collected, rolled into pills and passed around among his followers. And there are apocryphal gospels about how the infant Jesus’ diapers were hung to dry, and people who touched them were miraculously healed."

"We laugh at scatological jokes both because of our own anxieties about our potentially unreliable bowels and because it can help to shore up those (ultimately artificial) us/them and mind/body boundaries where we laugh safely on the side of complicit and well-regulated bowels. Laughter about shit is, then, typically a way for us to attempt to distance ourselves from its physical reality."