Toilet Is Smoking

About

Toilet is Smoking refers to a prank in which someone implores another to inspect the toilet because it is smoking. The person discovers the toilet has been decorated to resemble a person smoking, generally using full toilet paper rolls for eyes and an empty toilet paper roll as a cigar or cigarette.

Origin

On April 30th, 2011, LAD Bible posted the earliest known variation of the prank with the video "Lad Pranks Girlfriend With Frog In Toilet." The post received more than 2.6 million views, 35,000 comments, 32,000 reactions and 13,000 shares in less than one year (shown below).

Spread

Days later, on May 11th, Instagram ^[1] user @laiskajaakko shared a variation of the toilet decoration (shown below, left).

On August 20th, Twitter ^[2] user @RebeccaGaunt shared a version with the caption, "Husband: you spend too much time on social media. Me: maybe that’s why our toilet is smoking cigars for attention" (shown below, center).

Months later, on March 1st, 2020, Twitter^[3] user @GeorgeBridgers posted a version that received more than 1,700 likes and 100 retweets in less than one month. They captioned the post, "i just CATAPULTED myself out of bed because my gf said the toilet is smoking. this is what i find in the bathroom" (shown below, right).

On March 19th, ESPN host Matthew Berry tweeted,^[4] "My 8 year old daughter just yelled 'Oh no the toilet is smoking!!' My wife and I ran to the bathroom to find this. It’s just day 4 of home school." The tweet received more than 206,000 likes and 30,000 retweets in less than one week (shown below).

The meme also inspired a series of videos on TikTok of people pulling the prank on friends and family (examples below).

Several media outlets reported on the trend, including the AV Club^[5] and BuzzFeed. ^[6]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References