The Wit’s Guide to Shower Thoughts

Or, lather, rinse, conceit

Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (after 1437). The third figure from left seems oddly jaded, no?

The smooth surface of human consciousness gets pleasantly fogged up in a hot shower, and you may find yourself writing the most fascinating things upon it. Thus the showerthought, a particular sort of tiny revelation that regularly gets 29 million people on Reddit into a lather.

A polka dot shirt is a striped shirt but instead of running horizontally or vertically they run in the third dimension.

The r/showerthoughts subreddit defines their grails as “those miniature epiphanies you have that highlight the oddities within the familiar.” And while you may think about all sorts of things under the running water — a NASA engineer famously figured out how to fix the Hubble space telescope while staring at a German showerhead — the moderators only want a specific kind of revelation.

Technically, your alarm tone is your theme song as it starts every episode

And thus the ur-showerthought, the miniature epiphany that created this online community: If you set very specific parameters for creativity, you can harness the ephemeral and produce whimsy at scale. 

Light bulbs were such a good idea that they became a symbol for a good idea.

To pull the levers of clever, you have to exclude almost everything. Showerthoughts can’t be jokes, puns, wordplay, advice, analogies, common sense, plagiarism, politics, social justice, religion, personal perspectives, crazy ideas, questions, meta-submissions, or anything directly related to showers. Soap? Nope!

It’s hard to let someone know that they’re bad at taking criticism.

An ideal showerthought, the moderators explain, should “call attention to perspective-shifting details which have been overlooked or dismissed, but which seem obvious in retrospect.” 

Traditions are basically dead people peer pressuring us

They must slightly change the way you see the world. As they proudly proclaim, “it is almost impossible to intentionally come up with a completely original, well-written, and insightful showerthought... but that’s what makes them so interesting.”

Apparently, a lemon is not naturally occurring and is a hybrid developed by cross breeding a bitter orange and a citron. Life never gave us lemons; we invented them all by ourselves.

Also interesting: Setting these exacting rules for entry, then letting a giant group of anonymous people choose their favourites. Regrettably, the top-voted showerthought of all time is a damp squib of gender tropes. But of course the details that shift personal perspectives won’t be universal. Or as they say on web forums, your mileage may vary. 

Security at every level of an airport is absolutely ridiculous. Until you get to the baggage claim. Then it’s just like take whatever bag you want.

Some showerthoughts sound suspiciously like marijuana thoughts. Or to put it another way, they could be Mitch Hedberg jokes.

If you don’t smoke pot because you’re afraid it’ll make you paranoid, you’re experiencing the side effect without even smoking.

In theory, a shower thought should be the opposite of hearing about someone’s dream. Instead of a bunch of half-remembered nonsense from deep sleep, it’s a finely honed conclusion from the place you’re most awake.

The fact that we can’t fully control our own organs and bodily functions is like we don't have admin privileges of our own bodies

Which leads to my meta-showerthought: They’re called miniature epiphanies, a term Christians use to describe the day Jesus Christ was baptized, so is there some subtext here about the miniature baptisms we use to start our days? Or does this just prove that there’s no way to intentionally generate a showerthought? Or maybe my all-time fave showerthought sums it up perfectly:

Crispy is just crunchy but thin.

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This week’s ReccoMention!

One persistent theme of the showerthought genre is how foolish we were when we were young, which is itself a foolish thought! And which is why this week’s endorsement for my paid subscribers (only C$30/year) is an antidote to that sort of thing.

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This month’s Riposte Card!

Did you know that every month I commission a wonderful illustrator to riff on a great quip in postcard format, and then I send the results to founding subscribers for a mere C$80/yr? It’s a bona fide fact, and I’ll happily mail the complete archive of 11 cards to anyone who subscribes this week!

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Quote Vote

“I stood under that cold shower for ten minutes. Tomorrow I’m going to turn the water on.”
— Henny Youngman

In your next shower, consider what you’d like to read in this space next week, select your preference below, and be careful not to get soap in your eyes.

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That was issue 237 of Get Wit Quick, the weekly intersection of spontaneous creativity and personal hygiene. As opposed to business hygiene. I wrote about shower thoughts once before, but I think this time is better. The newsletter grew out of my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I always ask readers to tap the❤️ below, but I’ll admit I’m not sure why. Algorithms? Do it anyway, please!