The Commonwealth expression “taking the piss” or “taking the piss out of” generally connotes playful mockery, unreasonable behavior, or the taking of liberties at another’s expense. It’s an appropriate expression to use in conjunction with a British parody, but especially apt when discussing Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, which consists of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End and takes the piss out of the zombie, buddy-cop, and alien invasion genres. The phrase is particularly apropos not only because of the films’ parodic nature but also because urination features as a metaphor in each of the three films, and is especially prominent in the latter two. This paper explores the ways in which the realities of the human body and the shame sometimes associated with natural biological processes undermine the utopian ideals of Sandford, Gloucestershire in Hot Fuzz and Newton Haven in The World’s End, and underpin societal and religious effort to exert control over the body. In both instances, the natural, individual, and mundane act of waste disposal and purification is connected to a larger, unnatural societal act. The convergence of urination and parody in the films thus becomes a powerful statement on the almost unimaginable costs of attaining Utopia.
About the presenterRaymond Joseph DiSanza
Dr. Ray DiSanza is a professor of English and Literature at Suffolk County Community College. Scholarly interests include anglophone postcolonial studies, modernism and classical mythology. His dissertation focused on the use of epics and classical myths as frame stories in postcolonial writings. His work in Pop Culture explores many of the same questions regarding hegemony, otherness, and mythological structures.