Parenting & Family Quote by Adrian Edmondson

Edmondson is doing what his best comedy has always done: kicking the tasteful people in the shins and then grinning while they hop. The line opens by taking aim at the genre of commentary itself, the “rubbish written about toilet humour,” a neat bit of self-aware mud-slinging. He mocks the cultural performance of being “above” certain jokes, framing that disdain as pretense rather than principle. Taste, in his telling, isn’t refinement; it’s a social costume.

The punch isn’t the “willy gag” so much as the argument that comedy is judged by results, not pedigree. “Effectiveness” is the key word: a good dirty joke is treated like a well-engineered tool, not a guilty pleasure. That flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of toilet humor being a failure to be clever, cleverness becomes the ability to make something “low” land cleanly. It’s a quiet defense of craft.

Context matters because Edmondson comes out of Britain’s alternative comedy boom, when comics made a sport of puncturing middle-class propriety and the smugness of “good taste.” His subtext is that the outrage over childishness is itself childish - a policing instinct, a need to signal status. The line also smuggles in a generous view of audiences: people aren’t idiots for laughing at bodily nonsense; they’re human, and comedy that acknowledges that can cut through hypocrisy fast. The joke about the joke is a referendum on who gets to decide what counts as culture.