A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.
A four-panel comic where a man breaks restroom etiquette by standing right beside another at a urinal though others are free. It became a template for jokes about intrusiveness and awkward situations.
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The urinal comic, known in the English-language internet as Urinal Etiquette, is built on a single everyday situation. The action takes place in a men's restroom with a long row of urinals. In the first panel, a man calmly stands at one of the fixtures while a second man approaches from the back of the frame. In the second panel, the newcomer stands right next to the first, even though the other urinals are free. The humor rests on breaking an unspoken rule: in a public restroom, people try to leave as much distance between themselves as possible.
The picture shows only the beginning of the story: two of the four panels, where the first man stands at the urinal and the second approaches and stands next to him. The lines of dialogue aren't visible in the picture. The comic's structure is simple, with a minimum of detail, and that is exactly what makes it easy to recognize in remixes.
The comic's author has not been identified. The earliest known publication was found on the Brazilian humor site Capinaremos, where the comic appeared on March 2, 2010. Neither the author's name nor the original source the comic came from could be found, so the dating relies on this publication alone.
The topic of restroom etiquette was discussed online long before the comic. An animated instructional video by Kurt Nelis was uploaded to YouTube on July 12, 2006, and on September 2, 2009, Randall Munroe devoted a post to the problem on the xkcd blog titled "Urinal Protocol Vulnerability." The comic condensed this idea into a short story that can be read in a few seconds.
From 2010 to 2013, the image appeared on dozens of humor sites in different languages, often uncredited and without the author's name. In January 2013, basketball player Shaquille O'Neal posted it on Facebook with a caption saying that under his rules, that kind of behavior leads to a fight. In May 2013, it was reposted on FunnyJunk under the title "Maximum Overtroll." At that point, the comic was seen more as a successful image than as a template for remixes.
The peak of popularity, reflected in the catalog's "2015" tag, is tied to Tumblr. On October 6, 2015, user pi4nobl4ck posted a version in which the second character declares that he is vegan. The post gathered more than 39,000 notes within two weeks. Already that same October, more than a dozen captioned and Photoshopped parodies appeared on Tumblr, in which the second character's line was replaced with any other statement or confession.
It was precisely the ability to swap out one line and get a new joke that made the comic a convenient template. The remixes usually kept the composition, changing only the meaning of the second character's line, so the meme stayed recognizable even in altered form.
There are several reasons. The situation is recognizable to almost everyone: everyone has encountered someone who stands too close without any apparent need to. The comic requires no context, so it's easy to transfer to an office, an elevator, a bus, or a line. It isn't tied to any particular group of people: its humor targets intrusiveness and disregard for personal space, not specific social categories.
As a result, the meme exists in two modes: as an everyday joke about awkwardness and as an ironic response to someone else's behavior. It has stayed recognizable for more than ten years now, even though the original publication is rarely mentioned in discussions without its remixes.
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