"Today, East Gackle's own Andy Larkin is being hailed as a local hero for helping extinguish a fire that engulfed our mall's main escalator. Andy used... uh, natural means to help the fire department out. Way to 'go', Andy!"
— What's with Andy?, "Busting"
There's a fire burning and no way to put it out. There's no hoses or water sources nearby, the sinks aren't running, or any fire extinguishers in the immediate vicinity that could possibly put them out.
Luckily The Hero has to pee. Might as well put it to good use.
A type of Toilet Humour. This is often a conveniently-timed solution to a Potty Emergency. Fire needs to go out, protagonist needs relief, kills two birds with one stone, really. Can be a subtrope of Nature Tinkling. Oftentimes, a giant can be trusted to put out the fire this way. If an animal does it, it'll fall under Urine Trouble. Sub-trope of Revolting Rescue.
Do Not Try This at Home, as urinating on a fire will not be enough to put it out in real life note . Even in fiction, fire won't always be extinguished by urine if this trope is attempted.
Examples:
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Advertising
- A Japanese public service announcement about the dangers of high blood pressure opens with two men trying to put out a fire with their pee. When that doesn't work, one of the men scratches his head on a tree branch he was going to use to beat it out. He extinguishes it with the stream of blood that rockets out of his skull.
Anime and Manga
- In the Beast Wars II episode "White Lion, Run", Tasmania Kid attempts to put out a forest fire by peeing on the flames while in his Tasmanian devil beast mode.
Comic Books
- Subverted in issue 53 of the Futurama comic book. Leela notices a fire and instructs Bender to provide his built-in fire hose to put out the fire. Bender points out that Fry has a "hose" of his own and asks why Fry can't do it. Just as Fry begins to unzip his pants, Leela tells Fry to keep his "hose" holstered.
- In Milo Manara's erotic comic Gulivera, being inspired by Gulliver's Travels, the titular woman urinates onto a fire in order to save the Queen of Lilliput. Naturally, the Queen is disgusted and banishes Gulivera from her kingdom.
- Preacher: Sheriff Jesse Custer puts out a burning cross this way. As the Klan are watching.
- In The Shooting Star, Snowy, after discovering lit stick of dynamite on the deck of the Aurora, uses his canine abilities to put it out, leaving it in a small puddle. Snowy performs the same feat in the original black-and-white edition of Cigars of the Pharaoh.
Films — Animated
- Shrek: It's easy to miss, but when Shrek's shoe is set alight thanks to a campfire, Donkey puts it out by peeing on it.
Films — Live-Action
- Firehouse Dog: Late in the movie, all hands are on deck from the different fire stations to put out a fire on a garbage barge. Dewey finds his own way to help, urinating on a few flaming crates to put them out.
- Gulliver's Travels (2010): The Lilliputians' palace is on fire while King Theodore and Jinks are stuck inside, so Gulliver (who is a human and is gargantuan compared to the Lilliputians) urinates on the fire.
- In The Lion in Winter, Prince John, feeling sorry for himself, laments that no one cares about him (despite Henry, his father, considering him his favorite) to the point that if "I were on fire, no one would even piss on me to put out the flames." His older brother Richard snarks, "let's strike a flint and see."
- In The Little Rascals (1994), the He-Man Woman Haters Clubhouse catches fire after Spanky sabotages Alfalfa's date with Darla. Petey, a dog, attempts to put out the fire by peeing on it.
- Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb has Octavius and Jedediah stuck in a miniature diorama of Pompeii as it's burning. Dexter (a normal-sized Capuchin monkey) saves them by peeing on the fire.
- In Strange Brew, Bob saves a building from burning down this way after drinking an impossible volume of beer. This thankfully takes place offscreen.
- The Toxic Avenger: In Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, the Devil is set on fire, so Toxie puts him out by urinating on him.
- The Devil: Now I'm pissed!
- The Usual Suspects: The first glimpse we get of the infamous Keyser Soze is when he pisses on a Powder Trail to put it out before it can blow up a dock.
Folklore
- The Mannekin Pis
is a fountain in the city of Brussels which depicts a small boy urinating. There are several stories about the boy who inspired the fountain's design, including one in which he peed onto a burning building to help put it out. In another, he discovered some sappers who planned to blow a hole in the city walls during a siege and peed on the explosives to make them useless.
Literature
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Aeron Greyjoy once won a bet that he could quench a hearth fire with nothing but his piss. In honor of his "achievement", he named his new longship Golden Storm and hung a penis-shaped battering ram on the prow — or would have, if his brother Balon hadn't threatened to hang him from the mast if he did.
- Andy Griffiths' Just Series: Subverted in "Busting" from "Just Stupid", in which Andy apparently pees on a fire at the mall, but it turns out the story was All Just a Dream... and Andy wet the bed in his sleep.
- The Castle Perilous series has a scene in which a Devil to whom Lord Incarnadine's brother has sold his soul opens a pit to Hell to collect on the contract, but Lord Incarnadine - who has drunk an excessive amount of voodoo liquor - pees down the pit and extinguishes the fires of Hell.
- Catherine, Called Birdy: Catherine mentions her father pissing out a fire that had spread to the rushes covering the floor during a rowdy banquet.
My father, the genius, pulled down his breeches and put out most of the fire.
- Dear America: A close variant in The Journal of Patrick Seamus Flaherty: United States Marine Corps. At a couple of points a neighboring platoon comes under heavy attack by the Vietcong, and Patrick's unit provides support fire. In both cases the fight goes on so long that the Marines resort to urinating on their machine guns to cool them off.
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In Cabin Fever, Greg remembers having toilet-training issues when he was younger and having a dream about putting out a house fire with his pee because the firefighters' hose had broken.
- The Eyes of The Dragon by Stephen King. When King Roland slays the titular dragon at the start of the story, his men work to put out a fire that the dragon had started. They used beer and piss, and the text notes that most of the piss was beer, because Roland brought a lot with him when he went hunting, and he wasn't stingy with it.
- Gulliver's Travels: When the Lilliputians' castle is set alight, Gulliver solves the problem by peeing on the fire. This extinguishes the fire, but the Empress is too disgusted to be grateful.
- Simulated in How to Pee: Potty Training for Boys. At one point, a boy dressed as a fireman imagines that the toilet is on fire and pees in it.
- The Prince and the Pee: Prince Freddie has been suffering from a Potty Emergency throughout most of the book. When a dragon accidentally sets a castle alight by breathing fire on it, Prince Freddie pees on the fire, extinguishing it. The dragon is quite grateful.
Live-Action TV
- Dinosaurs: Simulated at the end of "Nature Calls". Earl is trying to toilet-train Baby, so he tells him to picture himself as a fireman putting out a fire so that he can learn to pee standing up. He then yells that he's not on fire, implying that Baby unintentionally peed on him.
- Drake & Josh: Subverted in the episode "We're Married?". After Drake accidently gets married to foreigner Yooka via a "friendship ceremony" (unaware that it is actually a wedding), Drake and Josh try to figure a way out of the marriage, but not before saying they need to put out the fire for the ceremony. Drake attempts to unzip and pee out the fire, but Josh stops him and puts it out with a vase of water. Josh yells at Drake as they exit the room.
- ''Friends: Joey and Chandler joke about this in "TOW Rachel Finds Out"
Chandler: Men are here!
Joey: We make fire! Cook meat!
Chandler: Then put out fire by peeing, no get invited back! - Misfits: Prior to the beginning of the series, a drunk Simon tried to get revenge on a bully by setting fire to his house. However, after noticing a cat in the house, Simon came to his senses and decided to extinguish the fire by urinating through the letterbox in the door. This is what caused him to be sent to do community service.
Video Games
- Conker's Bad Fur Day: Before defeating the furnace boss (aka, The Big Guy), Conker can beat the fire imps by peeing on them. They break out The Big Guy as revenge for him doing so.
- The freeware game I'm O.K makes it possible for the main character Osaki Kim to pee on stuff, and there are some areas where the ability to urinate can be used to put out fires. As the game was made to make fun of Jack Thompson and followed his "Modest Video Game Proposal", the peeing ability was included in the game to emulate the feature from Postal 2 per Thompson's request.
- Pee Monkey Jungle Fire has you playing as the eponymous Pee Monkey putting out the fire in the jungle with his pee.
- This is a viable gameplay mechanic in Postal 2 where urinating is one of Dude's "attacks" and besides annoying people and making them sick is used to put Dude out whenever he catches firenote by aiming upwards and peeing on himself.
- Project Spark: The Conker's Big Reunion level has the final objectives consist of Conker having to get drunk and putting out flames by pissing on them like he did with the fire imps in his original game. He first pisses to extinguish the lit fuses one of the Tediz started to try and blow up the Cock and Plucker, then does it once more to put out the flames when Birdy the Scarecrow is set on fire.
- Team Fortress 2: Jarate, a jar of urine, can be used by the Sniper to extinguish himself and allies that were set ablaze. You can get an achievement for saving a burning teammate by splashing him with Jarate ("Friendship is Golden").
Webcomics
- Parodied in Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth, with its titular character certain that he and Schweitzer can pull this off to put out a burning town. It doesn't work, but according to Schweitzer's shocked yelling, Flintlocke might have stood a slightly better chance attempting this than one would expect.
You just knocked over a tree!!
- A variant in NSFW Comix with the Bukkake Firemen, who use semen instead of urine to extinguish fires.
Western Animation
- Family Guy: In "E. Peterbus Unum", during "Can't Touch Me", Peter sings about how he can light a fire and then pee it out, which he does.
- John Callahan's Quads!: In the episode "Bad Manors", when Grizz's lit fart sets the Brombergs' curtain on fire, one of the members of Hell's Angels tries to put it out by peeing on it.
- Sons of Butcher: In "Buryin' The Past", when "Le Grotesque" catches on fire, Doug gets himself, Sol, and Ricky out by peeing on the fire in front of them.
- South Park: In "Pre-School", in a Flashback we learn that the boys got Trent Boyett sent to juvenile hall because he started a fire at their request. They asked him to start a fire so they could pee it out. It didn't work, and the fire got out of control.
- What's with Andy?: "Busting", which is adapted from the "Just" Series example mentioned above, has Andy drinking gallons of grape juice to get out of getting food for Lik and Leech, then having to spend most of the episode trying to find a bathroom. Unlike in the book, the events of the episode really happened. So instead of wetting his bed when he wakes up, Andy goes in some mall bushes and ends up putting out an escalator fire he accidentally started when the escalator ate one of his shoes. He ends up being hailed on the news for it.
