Mistaken for Toilet

"That's funny. Why is he going in the closet? The bathroom's right here.'"

— Pat, Pat & Stan

A gag where something that looks like a toilet, bathroom, or porta-potty leads to someone accidentally "relieving" themselves inside it, much to other people's disgust. It may also end badly for the person in question depending on what the supposed toilet actually is.

Many versions of this trope may occur. Tamer examples include the character/s instead just stumbling upon a thing or place initially perceived as a bathroom without actually having to go. Or, alternatively, they do have to go, but they get interrupted or realise their mistake before they can. Meanwhile, there may be inversions where the toilet or bathroom gets mistaken as something else, which may lead to some awkward situations.

A Sub-Trope of Toilet Humor and Not Where They Thought. May be the result of a Potty Emergency. May also be the result of Acting Out a Daydream if they're having a dream (or something similar) in which they're in a bathroom, as per the joke/word of advice: "If you see a toilet in your dream, don't use it." May also be performed if the character in question is The Ditz or a naive child. Related to Putting the Pee in Pool. See also Wrong Bathroom Incident, Pooping Where You Shouldn't, and Jar Potty. Contrast Excrement Statement, which covers cases of doing it deliberately as a gesture of contempt.

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Examples:

Advertisements

• In this ad, a cat thinks a sandbox is a giant litter box, so he is weirded out when he sees a little boy playing in it.
• Claude the Cat: One PSA reveals that Claude thinks of the beach as a giant litter box.
• A French ad for the Visual Opticians chain store had a man entering a music store to pee in a saxophone. Due to their shape and disposition (lined up against a wall, the big hole being at the right height and position), the saxophones could indeed have been mistaken for urinals by someone who is really vision-impaired.

Anime & Manga

• Inverted in Chi's Sweet Home, where the eponymous cat mistakes her litter box for a "play bed".
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: In a fishing village near Rome, the gang encounters a pair of drunks looking for a urinal. One of them relieves himself in a mailbox, while the other tries to go in a drinking fountain but succumbs to Green Day's attack before he can unzip his fly, with his friend following suit shortly after.
• My-HiME: Downplayed. While serving as a part-time Miko at Shiho's family shrine, Mikoto gets up saying she needs to go to the bathroom. She opens a door, and Shiho stops her, saying, "Don't go in there!" Shiho leads her off, and Mai sees the lovely wedding kimono in the room Mikoto had opened. Shiho informs Mai that it's not for the bride in the next day's ceremony, but set aside for Shiho herself.

Comic Books

• The Simpsons: At the start of "What Would Possibly Happen If... Cletus Went to College?" from Simpsons Comics #51, it is mentioned that Cletus has mistaken a photo booth for an outhouse twice.

Comic Strips

• In one comic of the Dutch comic strip series Boes (from which the anime Ox Tales was adapted), a gorilla mistakes a puppet show booth for a toilet and relieves himself there, much to the surprise of the children that were watching the show.
• Garfield: In one strip, Jon angrily declares he's never taking Garfield golfing again after what he has done, and Garfield implies that he mistook the sand trap for a litter box.

Fan Works

• In Jared Ornstead's Mirrors Multiplied (a Ranma ½ Mega Crossover), one of the subplots is that Ryoga Hibiki at one point got lost so bad he arrived in Gallifrey and became an apprentice Time Lord (and decided to use this knowledge to get revenge on Ranma). His TARDIS is locked in the design of a port-a-potty and constantly being broken in by homeless people to use as a toilet, even when 1) the TARDIS has some of the most advanced safeties in the universe (and Ryoga makes damned sure they are active before leaving the vehicle — and they still break in) and 2) the obvious "it's Bigger on the Inside" shock.
• In the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls fanfic Pinkie's Potty Problem ^note  AKA "Potty Panic Pinkie", Pinkie desperately has to pee and dashes into Sunset's house. Sunset starts to tell her that the bathroom is past her room, but before she can even finish, Pinkie runs into Sunset's closet, mistaking that for the bathroom (much to Sunset's horror). Weirdly enough, though, a toilet is heard flushing from inside the closet.
• Pound and Pumpkin Cake's Adventures (and Misadventures) in Potty Training:
  • Inverted in "Fluttershy and the Case of the Missing Potty", in which Fluttershy's pets wonder if Pumpkin's potty chair is a well (Beaverton), food dish (Hummingway), pet bed (Angel), trash bin (a raccoon), fishing bowl (an otter), hat (Harry), milk bowl (a flamingo), acorn bowl (a squirrel), flowerpot (a wasp) or Zecora's cauldron (a deer).
  • Another inversion occurs throughout the fanfic where the twins wonder if the toilet is a living creature, at first thinking it's a monster, and then later, when it breaks, thinking it's sick.
• In The Simpsons fanfic Maggie's Toilet Training, a fanfic of The Simpsons, Marge, who's trying to toilet train her one-year-old daughter Maggie, tells her to "do [her] business in the shiny white bowl". However, Maggie relieves herself in a white mixing bowl.

Films – Animation

• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America: When the titular idiot duo finds themselves in a Catholic church, they mistake the confession booths for porta-potties and go in. They then inadvertently start taking confessions from people thinking they're priests. Butt-Head asks to hear all the details of one man's sexual affair, while Beavis demands another pay his penance by doing 1000 Hail Mary prayers and hitting himself.
• Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio: Inverted when Pinocchio finds a chamber pot and mistakes it for a hat, much to Geppetto's chagrin.
• Igor: At one point, Schadenfreude reminds his Igor that the jacuzzi is not a bathroom.
• Madagascar: When Melman digs his own grave on the island, Marty thinks he's making a latrine.

Films – Live-Action

• Garfield: An inverted example occurs in A Tail of Two Kitties when Garfield stows away to London alongside Odie to accompany John. In the bathroom of John's hotel room, Garfield finds and climbs inside what appears to be a tiny bathtub just the right size for him to bathe in...only to be less than amused when the supposed 'bathtub' turns out to actually be a bidet.
• The Smurfs:
  • Inverted when Gargamel thinks that the toilet part of a porta-potty is a cauldron and thinks that the bad smell is due to dark magic.
  • A straighter example later happens when he mistakes a large bowl at a restaurant for a chamber pot and relieves himself in a corner with it, much to Azreal's embarrassment.
• In the opening scene of Up in Smoke, a stoned Pedro pees in a laundry hamper in a bathroom across from the toilet.
• ''The Under-Gifted'': On the first day of school, a student, Bebel, is caught smoking in the toilets of his high school, and is admonished by the headmistress. To get revenge, he glued the "toilets" sign on her office door instead. Moments later, new student Togo arrives in a hurry, opens this door thinking it's the toilets... and relieves himself on the floor, with his eyes closed. Of course you can do this with toilets you're familiar with, but Togo Didn't Think This Through. He opens his eyes finally and faces the shocked headmistress, but after a brief moment of embarrassment, Togo brushes it off and finishes to release himself on the floor.

Jokes

• A man comes home late one night, very drunk, and tells his wife, "I've just had proof of the existence of God." When she asks what he means, he explains, "I really needed to pee when I got in. As I opened the toilet door, God turned the light on for me, then turned it off again as I was shutting it!" His wife frowns, rushes downstairs, confirms her worst suspicions, and comes back up. "You idiot! You've peed in the fridge."
• A Catholic priest is taking confession and hears someone entering the other side of the booth, followed by an awkward silence. Eventually he decides to knock on the dividing wall in order to get the confessor's attention. When he does so, a voice says "Don't bother knocking — there's no toilet paper in this stall either!"
• Inverted in a joke about the Soviet occupiers of Vienna in 1945: A Soviet soldier, who is deployed in Vienna, writes home: "Mamushka, the Austrians have flats with many rooms; bedroom, living room, kitchen, dining room, stringroom." The mother asks back: "What is a stringroom?" The soldier's answer: "Well, you pull the string, shit gone!"
• One birthday card reads, "Why dogs find humans confusing," and it shows a dog peeing on some newspaper that was put down for him and being told, "You're peeing on the newspaper! Good boy!", only to then pee on a newspaper his owner was reading and be told, "You're peeing on the newspaper! Bad boy!".
• On a business trip to Texas, a man is drinking in a hotel bar. He orders a Manhattan, and it arrives garnished with a cherry the size of an apple. When he asks the bartender about this, he's told, "Everything is bigger in Texas." He orders a series of other drinks, each with its own improbably huge garnish, and every time is told: "Everything is bigger in Texas." Finally he gets up to go to the men's room, but takes a wrong turn and ends up falling into the hotel pool. Frantically he cries out: "Don't flush!"
• A man heads to a bar with his friends one night and gets utterly wrecked. The next morning, he finds that his credit card's gone missing, and he was so drunk last night that he forgot which bar he was at. All this guy remembers about the bar in question is that it had a golden toilet. So he goes downtown and heads into every bar he finds in order to ask about this, until finally he walks into a bar all the way to the other side of town where a brass band had been playing the night before. So the guy asks the bartender if this is the bar with the golden toilet. The bartender turns to one of the band members who is still at the bar, and he says, "Hey, Bill! I think we've found the guy who took a shit in your tuba last night!"

Literature

• Crosstime Traffic: When characters from alternate universes come to the "home timeline", they're often shocked at the contrasting technology levels and cultural norms. Jacques has no idea what a toilet is, and ends up using his hotel room trash can as a chamber pot before it's explained to him.
• The English Gentleman by Douglas Sutherland includes an anecdote about Lord Birkenhead affecting to mistake the Athenaeum Club for a public lavatory:
  Incidentally, it was the Athenaeum where the late Lord Birkenhead used to stop off to relieve himself on his daily walk from his home to the House of Lords. When challenged, after adopting this practice for some time, as to whether he was a member, he was supposed to have exclaimed: 'Good God, is this place a club as well?'
• Inverted in the kids' book The Fly, where the eponymous fly thinks the toilet is a swimming pool.
• In the kids' book Goldilocks and the Three Potties, a younger Goldilocks tries to potty-train herself. She knows that toddlers use kiddie potties, but doesn't know what one looks like, so she thinks a Wellington boot and a toy teacup are potties, only not using them because they're the wrong size.
• I Need A Wee: Implied — Robot tells Alan that the teapot is a "teapot, not a wee-pot" implying that Alan thought it was meant to be urinated into.
• In Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell, a visitor of the zoo comes into the lions' enclosure while it is being cleaned, thinking it is a toilet. No wonder he bolts out with truly incredible speed after the zoo's employee corrects his mistake.
• Inverted in Once Upon A Potty where the protagonist thinks the potty is a hat, pet bowl, or birdbath.
• Inverted in The Potty Book for Boys/Girls, where the protagonist thinks that the potty is a fishbowl or a toy boat.

Live-Action TV

• A Bit of Fry and Laurie: One vox pop features a woman played by Stephen Fry sticking her head out from behind the curtain of a photobooth and exclaiming "Excuse me, can't seem to find the flush".
• Black Books: In "The Blackout", Bernard visits his friends Gerald and Sarah in a drunken stupor, mistakes their kitchen for a bathroom, and uses their wicker chair as a toilet.
• Dinosaurs: Inverted in "Nature Calls", when Baby Sinclair thinks the toilet is a chair and wonders why there's a hole in it.
• Doctor Who: In "Silence in the Library," Miss Evangelista's stupidity is exemplified by an anecdote where the expedition was delayed by having to go back for her after she mistook the escape pod for the bathroom... twice.
• The Golden Girls: In one episode Sophia has broken her glasses and has problems seeing things, she is about to go on the stool in the kitchen but Rose yells at her to stop when she asks why Rose is in the Bathroom. Dorothy tells her it's the Kitchen and she realises her mistake and that she tried to poach an egg in the toilet.
• Good Luck Charlie: Take Mel Out to the Ball Game" ends with Bob making amends with his Uncle Mel after a disagreement that happened many years ago, after which, Mel has to pee and asks Bob where the bathroom is. Bob gives him directions, but Mel accidentally walks into the closet.
  Bob: He just walked into the closet, didn't he?
  Teddy: I'm afraid so.
  Bob: Hey, Mel, that's not a bathroom!
  Mel: It is now!
• Kath & Kim: Kim is in IKEA when she needs to go, however, when she does find a toilet, unknown to her it's a display and she has no idea.
• Inverted in Poirot's adaptation of Hickory Dickory Dock. Inspector Japp, while staying over at Poirot's place due to his wife being on vacation, mistakes the bidet for a face-washing implement. When he recounts this to Poirot, the latter doesn't even attempt to disabuse Japp of his assumption.
• Scrubs: While at a convention, JD sees an advanced toilet that can diagnose patients. The product is named Dr. Toilet. This causes him to fantasize about Dr. Toilet being another doctor at Sacred Heart. In this fantasy, JD keeps using Dr. Toilet to go to the bathroom, in spite of the Toilet's protests that he's a doctor.
• Single Drunk Female: When James and Sam are in New York, she takes him on a tour of all the places she did stupid and embarrassing things while drunk. At one point she passes a familiar bird bath, which reminds her that when you're drunk enough, everything white and porcelain looks like a toilet.
• Vida: At a party, Lyn drunkenly mistakes a sculpture for a toilet and urinates in it, causing the host to kick her out.
• The Worst Week of My Life: After a long drive to his in-laws' house, Howard rushes in to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize until it's too late that he's actually in the walk-in refrigerator and is peeing all over the Christmas goose.

Tabletop Games

• Classic Traveller, FASA supplement Action Aboard: Adventures on the King Richard: On the planet Rodar/Sheldule, the wealthy businesswoman Theresa Shrike once confused a religious shrine with an outhouse, triggering a native uprising.

Video Games

• Battle Bears: In Battle Bears Zero, Wil gets a Potty Emergency on the Ursa Major battleship and finds a door that he thinks is the one for the bathroom. It turns out to be an emergency exit and he pisses himself as he falls from a very high distance.
• Grand Theft Auto V: In the in-universe TV cartoon Republican Space Rangers, Dick, one of the titular Space Marines, has a Potty Emergency while attending a right-wing political rally after eating some bad chicken wings and takes a giant dump in the dome of a scale model of the United States Capitol building on stage, having mistaken it for a toilet in his food-poisoning-induced delirium. It gets mistaken for an Excrement Statement and prompts roaring applause from the crowd gathered, causing a pair of shadowy alien financiers to look at backing him as a candidate for office.
• Portal 2: One of Cave Johnson's prerecorded messages has him saying "That thing's called an elevator, not a bathroom!"
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police: Invoked in "Abe Lincoln Must Die!". Sam acts as an interpreter for Whizzer due to the President having a hard time understanding him. While Sam can accurately translate, to progress the have you have to get the President to give Whizzer a soda, causing Whizzer to ask for a bathroom. After that, Sam can translate Whizzer as asking for the bathroom, President Lincoln's room, or the War Room. Whizzer will go to wherever Sam asks the President without question.
  Max: Sam, did you just make an innocent person defile one of the most famous rooms in U.S. history?
  (Whizzer returns, relieved)
  Sam: Apparently, I did.
• Warioware Gold: An inverted example where the game's plot happens due to Wario mistaking a toilet belonging to Luxeville Village for a shiny crown.

Web Originals

• Muppet Viral Videos: At the start of "Food Fight", the Muppets stand in what they think is a line for the bathroom, but it's actually a line for the food trucks.
• Not Always Right: The bane of every retail worker: a hapless customer mistaking the fitting room for the bathroom.
  • Thankfully, this man was stopped in time.
  • A customer thinks that the handicapped sign on a room means that it is a bathroom and gets annoyed when the worker offers to show them but explains there is no toilet inside the fitting room.
    Customer: Well, why do you have a washroom with no toilet?
  • Bizarrely Inverted by this woman, who thinks that urinals are there for women to set their purses in while they use the stalls.

Western Animation

• Arthur: In "Pets and Pests", Nemo (a cat) is staying with the Reads and asks if D.W.'s toybox is a litter box. Luckily, Pal corrects him before Nemo can do anything.
• Baby Looney Tunes: Inverted in "Flush Hour", where Daffy thinks the toilet is a monster.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: In "Speed Trap", Team Lightyear is placed on speed trap duty as a result of a botched meeting with the Porcelons, a group of aliens who resemble toilets. After Buzz, Mira, and XR keep accidentally saying "sensitive" terms to the Porcelons, which were toilet-related puns, the meeting was ultimately botched when Booster, who's having a Potty Emergency as the other restrooms were closed for cleaning, mistakes the Porcelon ambassador for an actual toilet.
• CatDog: A variation in "Let the Games Begin!"; at the start of the episode, Cat admonishes Dog for mistaking a dogcatcher's leg for a fire hydrant.
• The Cleveland Show: The episode "American Prankster" has Rallo pulling pranks on people all over Stoolbend, one of them being disguising rooms like electrical rooms and stairwells as bathrooms. Cleveland ends up falling for it twice.
• Family Guy:
  • In a gag relating to nautical terms in the episode "Stewie Kills Lois", Peter ends up mistaking the term "Poop Deck" to mean "a place to defecate", so he did exactly that, which resulted in him and Lois getting barred from that section of the ship by the captain for the remainder of the cruise.
  • One episode has Peter being left alone in a massage room by Bruce. When Peter notices the massage table, he pulls down his pants and relieves himself through the face rest thinking it's some kind of toilet due to its shape. Bruce is less than pleased with him for it.
    Bruce: Oh, haha, you put some fake poo on the floor— (realizes it's real) OH NO! Get-- Get out! Get out! Scat! (Peter runs out of the room)
  • A Running Gag has people mistaking Stewie's time machine for a porta-potty due to its similar shape. This becomes a plot point in "Road to Germany" when Mort ends up using Stewie's time machine by mistake and gets sent back to World War II. This is undone when Stewie and Brian go back to before he used the time machine and forbid him from going inside.
  • The episode "Baby Got Black" has Peter and friends trying to stay awake as long as possible. Eventually, said lack of sleep catches up to them, and they start hallucinating. Peter mistakes Quagmire for a toilet and starts to try and poop on him. Thankfully, Quagmire is able to snap him out of it before anything happens.
  • The episode "HTTPete" revolves around Peter accidentally destroying the internet by urinating on the servers, thinking the room containing them was some kind of hi-tech bathroom. He eventually manages to fix them by sticking them all in giant bags of rice.
• Futurama:
  • Fry thinks that in New York at least, phone booths can be used as bathrooms.
  • In "Into the Wild Green Yonder", Fry finds the environmental survey for the area where Leo Wong intends to build his golf course in progress after falling asleep on what he thought was the toilet. What he actually fell asleep on is left unsaid.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • At the start of "Billy and Mandy Save Christmas", a very frantic Billy is in a long line. He assumes it's the line to the men's room, but a kid in front of him informs him that it's the line to see a Mall Santa.
  • In "The Grim Adventures of the Kids Next Door", Billy mistakes the Delightful Children's delightfulization chamber as a bathroom. They initially let him in, before realizing Billy mistook it for a bathroom, and went in to try and stop him. Billy then presses a button which he assumes is to flush, causing the combination of Billy, the Delightful Children, Grim's Scythe, and Harold's Lucky Pants ends up creating the main antagonist of the crossover special.
    Billy: Excuse me! Are you in line for the bathroom?
    Delightful Children: Why no, go right ahead.
    Billy: Thank you!
    Delightful Children: You're wel- HEY! That's not a bathroom! Get out of there this instant!
• The Hey Arnold! episode “Rich Guy” has two scenes where Grandpa Phil mistakes a sink for a toilet.
• Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh: In the first episode, Oh comes out of a washing machine with a Toilet Paper Trail on one of his legs. Tip then reacts in disgust when she checks the inside of the washer, implying that Oh mistook it for a toilet.
• Hotel Transylvania: The Series: In "Exit Sandman", Hank gets a Potty Emergency when he and the gang get trapped in a dream world. Later on, they find Diane in a hot tub and Hank whispers that he thought that was the bathroom, implying he peed in there.
• Happens offscreen in The Legend of Korra, with Tenzin's son Meelo. We don't know what Meelo mistook for a toilet, but he was at a fancy party, and Tenzin angrily shouts "Meelo, no! That is not a toilet!"
• In Lilo & Stitch: The Series, the presence of Experiment 113, which causes misfortune in a local area, causes a hapless tourist to open a closet on Jumba and Pleakley's spaceship that he thinks is a bathroom, which irradiates him. As he runs off, screaming in pain, Pleakley says the glow should wear off in a few million years.
• Martha Speaks: In "Puppy Skits", T.D. is heard exclaiming, "My posters!" and C.K. responds, "At least he's paper trained," implying that the younger Skits either peed or pooped on T.D.'s papers due to mistakenly thinking they were put down for him to "use".
• Mickey Mouse (2013): In "Outta Time", Mickey and his pals visit Ludwig Von Drake's science expo, and Goofy bugs Mickey over where the bathroom is. Mickey points to something out of sight, and Goofy ends up going into one of Von Drake's time pods, which transports him back to prehistory.
• My Gym Partner's a Monkey: In "My Science Project", Jake mistakes Adam's science fair volcano for a toilet, and he uses it when he has to go and the other boy's room stalls are full.
• Nina Needs to Go!: In "Beach", Nina wrongly enters a shower room, thinking it's a public toilet. Luckily, she realises her mistake and walks out of the shower room.
• Pat & Stan: In "Peeing 2", Stan mistakes the closet for the bathroom and Pat wonders why he's going in the closet.
• Pig Goat Banana Cricket: In "Total Bananarchy", Cricket, who flees to Mars for a more organized society, accidentally thought the Mars Emperor looked like an actual toilet he just pooped in, after eating too many carrots, which was against the rules.
• Inverted in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Popcorn Pandemonium". Moviegoers Rocko and Heffer, desperate to get to their film before the previews are over, enter a dark room and complain that something was spilled on both their seats. A flip of the light switch reveals that they're sitting in urinals in a men's room.
• Rugrats:
  • Rugrats (1991):
    • Inverted in "Chuckie vs. the Potty" in which the twins think Chuckie's training potty is a hat or a bowl.
    • Played straight in "The Big Flush", where the babies get taken to a swimming pool, which they mistake for a giant toilet and try to flush it just for kicks, eventually deciding the diving board must be the flusher.
    • In "Opposites Attract", when Freddie tells Chuckie about sand lizards, Chuckie refuses to believe him, saying the only time he was afraid of a sandbox was when he was visiting Angelica's house and Fluffy had mistaken Angelica's sandbox for a giant litter box.
  • Rugrats (2021): In "Traditions", Lil mistakes the stand for the Pickles family's Christmas tree for a potty chair.
• Scaredy Squirrel: The episode "Fistful of Quarters" has the Stash N' Hoard's employees mistaking Scaredy's toilet sculpture made of toilet paper for a real one, much to Scaredy's disgust and annoyance.
  Buck: (as he's hosing away the first toilet sculpture) And all I'm saying is there should've been a sign or something!
• The Amazing World of Gumball: The episode The Nuisance has a montage listing the crimes the Wattersons have committed revealing that Gumball accidentally vandalized an art museum. The flashback shows him mistaking a sculpture of a urinal for a real urinal, only to wash his hands in another art piece, he mistakes for a sink.
• The Simpsons:
  • Inverted in "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", where Grampa mistakes a porta-potty for an elevator.
    Grampa: This elevator only goes to the basement. And someone left an awful mess down there.
  • In "The Wandering Juvie", Homer mistakes a dressing room at Costington's for the bathroom.
    Yes Guy: Sir, other customers need to use that dressing room.
    Homer: Dressing room? ...Uh-oh.
  • Implied in "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday". Following Homer and his friends wrecking a bus taking them to Miami for the Super Bowl, trip organizer Wally Kogen apologizes to the bus driver for them making a mess in the bathroom. The bus driver meekly asks, "What bathroom?"
  • In "Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part Two)", Grandpa goes outside the family's house to relieve himself at the outhouse.
    Lisa: We don't have an outhouse.
    Homer: (Gasp) My toolshed! (Runs after Grandpa) Oh, dad!
  • Inverted in "Helter Shelter", while being shown around a 19th-century house they'll be staying at for a reality show, Homer mistakes a chamber pot for a helmet.
  • In "Midnight Rx", the Simpsons go to the Springfield Air and Space Museum for a Springfield Nuclear Power Plant party:
    Homer: Free admission, great grub, and we got to use the bathroom of the future.
    Marge: Homer, that was Apollo 12!
• Special Agent Oso: In "Potty Royale", Aiden says he has to use the bathroom, so Oso tries to look for the bathroom. Oso briefly mistakes a broom closet and a bedroom for the bathroom, but Aiden (who actually knows where the bathroom is) finds it before him.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Plankton Gets the Boot", Plankton walks out of a door, thanking SpongeBob for letting him use his bathroom, only for the latter to reveal that it was actually his closet. Plankton then tells him he probably needs to get new shoes, implying he used one as a Jar Potty.
  • Zigzagged in "Roller Cowards" where SpongeBob and Patrick claim they're queueing to ride a rollercoaster called the Fist o' Pain, only to be told it's actually the line for the bathroom. Ordinarily, this would be an inversion, but since both are scared to ride the rollercoaster, it's unknown if it was a genuine mistake or if they were stalling.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: A Pakled spy accidentally ejects himself from the Cerritos and claims that he mistook the airlock for a toilet. The other characters think that he couldn't have been that stupid, even given Pakleds' generally low intelligence, and that he must have been attempting espionage or sabotage. A Brick Joke ending then reveals that he did, in fact, defecate in the airlock.
• T.U.F.F. Puppy:
  • In the episode "Share a Lair", Dudley keeps mistaking the water fountain for a toilet and the actual toilets for water fountains.
  • The episode "The Rat Pack" kicks off when Snaptrap mistakes a cloning machine inadvertently put out onto the curb by T.U.F.F. for a porta-potty, going on to create an army of clones that terrorize Petropolis.
• Winston's Potty Chair: Inverted when Winston mistakes a training toilet for a hat (to the point of having an Imagine Spot about a tribe declaring him as their chief because of this supposed headgear) and then wonders if it's a saddle.

Real Life

• Zig-Zagged with Dada artist Marcel Duchamp's famous piece "Fountain," in which he put a signature on a porcelain urinal and entered it in an art exhibition. The piece sparked a lively discussion on the nature of art, as the simple act transformed an ordinary toilet into a valuable art object. Perhaps predictably, in the later 20th century, some other performance artists attempted to urinate in replicas of "Fountain" (Brian Eno even claims to have succeeded at it), creating a scandal on the reasonable grounds that one should not pee in art objects. But this sets up a Logic Bomb question: can we count it as misusing art as a toilet when it's a case of using a toilet as art?

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