"All I want is JUSTICE! Justice and dry pants."
It's not the crime... it's the cover-up
Who Wet My Pants? is a children's book by Bob Shea (the author of Dinosaur VS.) It concerns an anthropomorphic bear named Ruben who, on a camping trip with a group of friends, wets his pants without noticing.
Rather than realise that he was the one who wet them, he believes one of his friends did it and tries to determine which one it was, while they try to convince him that it was him, but at the same time reassure him that they're not holding him responsible.
Who Wet My Pants? provides examples of...
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal:
- The tortoise wears only a hat, a bandanna, shoes, and glasses.
- The squirrel wears only a hat and bandanna.
- Ahem: One of Reuben's friends clears their throat when they notice he wet his pants.
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: One of Reuben's friends is a pink hippo.
- Ambiguous Gender: We know that there are six males (Reuben, Jared, Oskar, Tim, Teddy, and Bigfoot), two females (Julia and Linzie) and one unknown (Kelly, which is a unisex name) but (with the exception of Ruben, Tim, and Bigfoot), we don't know who is who, so it's hard to tell which are boys and which are girls. We at least know the tortoise is male, since Reuben calls him "Mr. All-the-Answers" and the hippopotamus and hedgehog are female, since they wear dresses.
- Anthropomorphic Food: The donut shop has illustrations of living donuts.
- Baffled by Own Biology: Ruben wets his pants due to taking a nap with his hand in a tropical fish tank. He doesn't even notice he's wet his pants until later, and then thinks that someone else did it, or his pants have "sprung a leak".
- Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Reuben, Bigfoot, the dog, and the hippo all wear scout outfits without shoes.
- Beary Funny: Reuben is a bear, and his pants-wetting and subsequent obliviousness and accusations are Played for Laughs.
- Bizarre Taste in Food: Tim and Teddy like maple-bacon flavoured donuts. Reuben lampshades this by describing this flavour as "gross".
- Blaming the Tools: When Ruben realises that none of his friends wet his pants, rather than realise he did, he thinks that his pants are broken and "leaky."
- Denied Food as Punishment: When no one admits to wetting Reuben's pants (because they were all innocent), he says, "No one gets donuts until I get answers!".
- The Ditz: Reuben doesn't notice when he wets his pants and when it's pointed out to him, he thinks first that someone else did it and then that they sprang a leak.
- Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Tim and the hedgehog both wear full scout uniforms.
- Funny Animal: The main characters are animals but behave like humans.
- Furry Reminder: When Reuben confronts the tortoise, he hides in his shell.
- Gigantic Gulp: In the morning, Reuben drank an entire jug of lemonade while helping at the stand.
- Interspecies Friendship: The main characters are a bear, hedgehog, lion, hippo, cryptid, raccoon, dog, squirrel, and tortoise, and they're all friends on a camping trip together.
- Mistakes Are Not the End of the World: The dog reassures Reuben that "it could happen to anyone" regarding his wet pants.
- No Name Given: Zigzagged. Everyone's names are said, but we don't know who has which name, aside from Ruben (the bear), Tim (the lion), and Bigfoot.
- Potty Failure:
- The premise of the book is that Reuben wet his pants without realising and is trying to find out who did it.
- Bigfoot claims he used to wet his pants all the time.
- Questioning Title?: The book's title ends in a question mark.
- Threaten All to Find One: Ruben doesn't notice that he has wet his pants (from taking a nap with his hand in a fish tank) and thinks that one of his friends did it. Since he was about to give everyone donuts, and doesn't believe the friends when they say they didn't do it, he decides that "nobody gets donuts until I get answers".
- Unsound Effect: When Reuben squeezes the donut box, the word "Squish" can be seen.
- Warm Water Whiz: The reason Reuben wet his pants is because he fell asleep with his paw in his tropical fish's tank.
