Bathroom Stall Graffiti



"''I read the graffiti in the bathroom stall Like the holy scriptures of the shopping mall"

- Green Day, "Jesus of Suburbia"

Bathroom stalls tend to have all manner of interesting things written on the walls. Usually, it's phone numbers, or crude insinuations about characters (often the very character who's reading it). Occasionally you'll find poetry, pithy sayings, colorful drawings, or Arc Words. Often includes some variation on "For a good time call..."

Let's just say this is Truth in Television for more than half of us, and leave it at that. Commonly found in a Disgusting Public Toilet.

Archaeology has proven this trope to be Older Than Feudalism: see the Real Life examples.

Anime & Manga

 * This was parodied in the Excel Saga episode "The Interesting Giant Tower", where Excel kept finding mysterious messages on the bathroom wall that help her along, until she finds the last message that claims even the message leaver is now stuck.
 * In the Full Metal Panic! manga, someone writes false rumors about Kaname on the boys' bathroom walls. Sousuke decides to immediately interrogate the first suspect. With a toilet.
 * Eda from Black Lagoon explains the handy escapy instructions she left for Greenback Jane with a analogy of a bathroom stall scribble that makes the person reading look around the booth.
 * Up to Eleven in Tekkon Kinkreet. Of course, it's an entire film caked in graffiti, but the bathrooms were every ounce as crazy as the rest of it.
 * In the Detective Conan manga there is a bathroom scene in volume 32 where the wall says "welcome to HELL".

Comic Books

 * Jason of FoxTrot has done this at least twice, giving out Paige's phone number and e-mail address.
 * In Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, there is a bathroom with "Somebody put shit in my pants!!" written on one of the stalls.

Fan Works

 * Matters of Faith has graffities all over the bathrooms in the Geofront. The most amusing of these are the "Gendo Ikari Facts" which pose him as a Memetic Badass on par with Chuck Norris. The kicker is, he wrote most of these (including the ones in the women's bathrooms) himself to keep his subordinates in line.
 * And Hyuga thought Gendo won't notice if the Facts are archived in the Magi records... at least Gendo had a good laugh at it.

Film
""For a good time call Allyson Wonderland. The best is yet to be!""
 * Bathroom graffiti tell Tucker McElroy where The Blues Brothers are performing.
 * In Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Norah finds a clue about where the band where's Fluffy is playing while in the bathroom stall.
 * On Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Eddie ducks into a Toontown bathroom which has this written on the wall:

"They'll write your name on the bathroom wall "For happily ever after give Fiona a call""
 * In its theatrical release, The Best is Yet to Be was replaced with Michael Eisner's phone number in a frame. This was removed for the VHS/DVD release.
 * The Fairy Godmother's song in Shrek 2:


 * "Reststop" features a trashed woman's restroom with graffiti all over the stalls, each a cryptic (or not so cryptic) message about the homicidal, truck driving, maniac who hunts down those who go to the reststop. Later the heroine of the movie leaves her own message on a stall door.
 * In Withnail and I, the protagonist sees some graffiti in a bathroom stall which reads, "I fuck arses." This, combined with his encounter with a man who called him a ponce, causes him to be so scared that, as his voiceover tells us, he can't even pee straight.
 * In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd uses the gas station bathroom and only to find out that the graffiti message for scheduled "manly love" happens the exact same day and time he's in the stall.
 * The cowboy/mummy from Bubba Ho-Tep etches some hieroglyphic graffiti onto a bathroom stall of the rest home (which JFK translates).
 * In Road House, the owner of the Double Deuce finds some offensive graffiti on the wall and simply edits it (Technically in the hallway outside the bathrooms, but close enough)
 * At the beginning of Slaughter High, Marty finds "Marty Rantzen Sucks!" scrawled on the wall of the girl's locker room. He changes the S to an F.
 * "The Ice Harvest" shows John Cusack reading such Graffiti at a urinal, saying aloud: "As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls."

Literature
"An alternative translation, scrawled no doubt on a 'fresher wall somewhere by a clever graffitist, had caught on over the last few years: "I'm Milking Scragged; Life's Over.""
 * In the Stephen King story "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" (in Everything's Eventual), a salesman contemplating suicide reconsiders because he has collected so much toilet graffiti over his years of traveling that he could write a good book on the subject and better his meaningless existence; he's also afraid that if he does kill himself, he'll be judged insane based on his having a notebook in his briefcase inexplicably filled with phrases like Save Russian Jews, Collect Valuable Prizes.
 * Audrey Wait: Audrey and Victoria find stick figures labelled with her name and another famous singer doing oral in a bathroom stall, along with the phrase "Audry sucks dik".
 * In The Crying of Lot 49, the mysterious muted-trumpet symbol which functions as non-verbal Arc Words (symbolizing an alleged Ancient Conspiracy) is seen as bathroom graffiti.
 * When Rinso visits the dunny outside Crocodile's tavern in The Last Continent, he notices "the usual minutiae from people who needed people, and drawings done from overheated hope, rather than memory", but also the Arc Images of figures in pointy hats.
 * Monstrous Regiment has Polly, an innkeeper's daughter, mention graffiti a few times, and correcting the anatomy.
 * There's a Star Wars Expanded Universe story called "Side Trip" where Corran has to explain what he was looking at to an observant bounty hunter  and claims it was graffiti. Naturally this leads to a discussion of "real" art.
 * Marginal example: Death Star has Doctor Uli Divini, who'd been serving ever since the Clone Wars because of an order that meant he could never quit, groused about it. The Imperial Military Stop Loss Order kept him and many others there for as long as they wanted him, or until he was killed.


 * This becomes the only contact with reality The Dictator has on The Autumn of the Patriarch.
 * In Vegan Virgin Valentine, the day after Mara's niece V arrives in town, Mara finds graffiti in the bathrooms saying "V Valentine Is A Slut". Later, after she and V start getting along, she takes a thick marker and crosses it off. (And even later, she mentions it to V, who admits to having done the graffiti herself.)
 * In the novel The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, history professor Tony Fremont notes the graffiti on the wall of the washroom in the Faculty of History building: Herstoy Not History, Hersterectomy Not Hystorectomy, above which is FEMINIST DECONSTRUCTION SUCKS.
 * Not a bathroom, but Mercy Thompson keeps a graffiti-covered wrecked car on her lawn to annoy her neighbor, Adam. One of the scrawled messages (applied at the suggestion of Adam's teenage daughter) is a "For a good time, call Adam" note that includes his phone number.
 * In Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, graffiti written on the bathroom wall at Pages reads, 'Julian gives great head. And is dead' followed by 'Fuck you Mom and Dad. You suck cunt. You suck cock. You both can die because that's what you did to me. You left me to die. You both can rot in fucking shitting asshole hell. Burn, you fucking dumbshits. Burn, fuckers. Burn.' Lovely.
 * In the Knight and Rogue Series Michael admits that he learned to brew a drug that was once common for nobles to know while at university. When this shocks Fisk he quickly ammends that no professor would teach the recipe to a now illegal drug, but you could always find variations written on the bathroom stalls.

Live Action TV

 * Quinn of Glee drew a whole pornographic picture of Rachel on a bathroomstall.
 * In Scrubs, Elliot ends up in the men's bathroom and finds her "butt rating" in one of the stalls.
 * Night Court had an episode where the Judge has a brief fling with a rock star in the men's bathroom - full of graffiti, she comments that the women's bathroom has more interesting ones.
 * In My So-Called Life, it wasn't just the stalls, the ENTIRE girl's bathroom was coated completely in graffiti.
 * The men's room at Arnold's in Happy Days.
 * In a 3rd Rock from the Sun episode, Mrs. Dubcek asked Harry, working in the town bar, if someone put her phone number on the wall of the men's bathroom. He replied no and she asked him to go put it up "before that bearded guy takes a leak".
 * There's apparently some very explicit graffiti about Sally on a toilet door in Drop the Dead Donkey. A Running Gag is "That's not what it says in the Ladies"; and Helen is, at first, nicknamed Stalin, leading Gus to tell Dave to go and clean the graffiti in the toilets: "Some of it is ancient - it even mentions Stalin!"
 * In the Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide episode on Bathrooms, Ned gets Moze to write his name on the "Hottie List" in the girls' toilets. Someone puts a lipstick kiss on the toilet wall next to his name (which is a really gross thing to do) and Ned tries to find out whose lipstick it was. Hilarity Ensues.
 * From 'The Wire: "Rawls Sucks Cock" at the Baltimore Central Police station staff men's room.
 * The plot of the Cold Case episode "Justice" hinges on this.
 * In the All in The Family episode "Archie is Worried About His Job", Archie expects a phone call late at night, but he gets a guy who misread a number on a toilet wall instead.
 * In Frasier, Niles apparently goes into the bathroom stalls of the local coffee bar and corrects the grammar and spelling of the graffiti with a red marker.
 * Occasionally turns up in Police Procedural shows, as when victims of a campus date rapist have been afraid to report the crime, so write warnings to other potential victims all over the lady's room stalls.

Music

 * The famous eighties song "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone is based on this trope. It led to many misdials in every area code.
 * There's a gay Gender Flip version, which rather implies that 867-5309/Jimmy wrote his own number on the men's room wall.
 * 6060-842, the flip side of the B52's Rock Lobster single, also plays with this trope. "Tina went to the Lady's room / Saw written on the wall / "If you'd like a very nice time / Just give this number a call" / It was 6060-842 / 606 and I'm waitin' for you..." suggesting the call could be made from a Pay Phone for a dime. Alas, the operator said.
 * In the pre-1995 North American Numbering Plan, a 0 or 1 in the second digit was reserved for area codes in most localities, so in The Eighties the number doesn't work. Alas, Technology Marches On.
 * "Bathroom Wall" by Faster Pussycat.
 * Jimmy Buffett admitted that a graffito inspired him to write the song, "The Weather Is Here, I Wish You Were Beautiful."
 * The cover art of Nomeansno compilation The People's Choice features some real life graffiti reading "How fucken old is Nomeansno? Give it up grand dads", followed by band member John Wright's response of "That's 'great grand dad' to you fucker!".
 * The original cover art of The Rolling Stones' 1968 album Beggars Banquet features this. While their record label refused to issue it at the time (substituting a spare white cover with a mock dinner invitation instead), the bathroom cover was eventually restored for the album's CD reissue.
 * Jimmy Fallon's comedy/music album The Bathroom Wall. Even has a title drop in one song: "Now listen up, y'all/ I know I'm not tall/ My name is never written on the bathroom wall."
 * Simon and Garfunkel (1963) substitute "subway wall" for some reason. And the sign said: "The words of the prophets are / Written on the subway walls / And tenement halls / And whispered in the sound of silence."
 * As quoted above, "Jesus of Suburbia" from Green Day's American Idiot. In the video, he trashes a bathroom and covers it with graffiti.
 * Among the comically bland platitudes mellifluously intoned during National Lampoon's Deteriorata is "For a good time, call 606-4311. Ask for Ken."

Radio
"Hamish: That'll be because they have both hands free. Dougal: Och, I never thought of that. Often heard it, but never thought of it."
 * In I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue episode "You'll Have Had Your Tea", Hamish and Dougal notice the graffiti in the ladies' has much neater handwriting.

""Here I sit / all broken hearted. / Came to sh-* beep* / but only farted. "Please don't throw toothpicks in the urinals. The crabs have learned to pole-vault.""
 * There's a bit from the Bob & Tom Show, circa 2000 entitled "Graffiti Wisdom". It's a fake commercial for 2 hours of recordings of bathroom graffiti being read by "James Earl Jones".

Tabletop Games

 * The obscure horror RPG In Dark Alleys has the Scribblers, a group of radical philosophers and academics who specialize in taboo ideas and all subjects other scholars find too ridiculous, scary, or "obviously wrong" to deal with. Once, they exchanged ideas by writing little notes inside of unpopular library books, but they were found out by The Powers That Be, all the books (mostly...) were burned and many Scribblers eliminated. These days, they communicate with each other by writing graffiti in all the places it is usually ignored: bathroom stoles, subway and bus stations, dirty back alleys. Try to take a closer look at the graffiti on a bathroom stole: between all the phone numbers of prostitutes, you just may find a mysterious argument about Nietzsche and Paglia, and the strange and terrible powers you may learn to wield if you truly understand the meaning of their philosophies...

Video Games

 * An early puzzle in the first Leisure Suit Larry game requires reading the graffiti in a stall to find out the passphrase to a restricted room.
 * A puzzle in Maniac Mansion involves graffiti on a bathroom wall. In a house.
 * The high score screen from Guitar Hero 2.
 * Left 4 Dead uses graffiti in safe rooms to add to the atmosphere, and to provide humor.
 * There is also literal Bathroom Stall Graffiti in The Passing DLC.
 * Jeanette from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines says her name is all over the bathroom stalls. If her e-mail inbox is any indication, this isn't far from the truth. Just don't tell that to
 * In City Of Secrets, it's possible to see a piece of graffiti in a public toilet that hints at a possible puzzle.
 * In the Sam and Max Freelance Police game "Chariot of the Dogs" we see the graffiti that Bosco has left in his own bathroom. These are hints to a puzzle, but to Max, they read suspiciously like male-enhancement ads.
 * Super Paper Mario has some stalls with graffiti in Merlee's Mansion.
 * No More Heroes has graffiti in every save room in the game, which happen to be- you guesses it- Bathrooms.
 * The Resistance in Brink graffiti over the signs in the aquarium, complete with Yo Momma jokes.
 * A drawing in Escape From St Marys fills your character with horror. You, the player, never get to actually see it.

Web Comics

 * Mentioned in an early installment of Errant Story.
 * In Narbonic, when Dave was unstuck in time he read a message to himself in a public bathroom that had been there for 10 years (ever since he wrote it, later in the same arc).
 * This Xkcd strip.
 * Bathroom graffiti shows up in El Goonish Shive in these two strips.
 * Monkey Dust has a sketch where a character writes graffiti on a cubicle wall requesting oral sex.
 * Terminal Lance and its Animated Adaptation, Post, both feature various vulgar images and sayings as graffiti, particularly the Real Life "Wagner Loves The Cock".

Web Original

 * The website Ask A Urinal was home to quite a bit of graffiti (from bathrooms and elsewhere), and people do try to come up with questions that the graffiti can answer.
 * It's also VERY VERY NSFW at times.
 * The Writings On The Stall.

Western Animation
"Squid Hat: they didn't! Toadblatt: They did! I saw it! 'For a very good time' indeed!"
 * Glenn Quagmire of Family Guy has something of this sort tattooed on his butt.
 * In Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, when Birdman wonders how he could get the number of the girl he likes, every other man in the room immediately says "Stall three."
 * Girl Stuff Boy Stuff, as part of a frankly contrived "everyone in detention" plotline, had the boys correcting the spelling of this.
 * The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy has Billy being told to read what's on a stall. He reads "For a good time, call--" before being cut off and told he's reading the wrong thing.
 * According to Dean Toadblatt, one of the Weaselthorp House's many crimes is writing his name on the restroom wall.


 * In As Told by Ginger, the words "Courtney is a" can be seen in the boy's room in the elementary school. Hoodsie blocks out the rest of it.
 * Other lines include "Courtney Gripling is a babe" and "Ginger and Jake".
 * In Fillmore!, one of the episodes centered around bathroom graffiti and stainless steel stalls.

Real Life

 * Not only is it Truth in Television, it's Older Than Feudalism. Take a look. In Pompeii. "O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin."
 * Okay, so only one of those was actually written in a latrine, but close enough. Too Much Very Very Out Of Date Information.
 * There was an interesting study comparing Pompeii graffiti to 1960's era. Turns out we're Not So Different.
 * In the Oregon Trail land rush of 1843-1857, Independence Rock in Wyoming was the target of graffiti which remains today. Passing voyagers carved their names, not into the privy walls, but into the stone face of a landmark hill during their journey westward to Oregon or California.
 * Somewhere in the Virgin Islands, Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" is carved on a bathroom door.
 * The Jefferson Memorial bathroom has patriotic graffiti all over its walls.
 * There is an apocryphal WWII era tale, that within hours of his arrival at the Yalta Peace Summit between the Allies, Stalin emerged from the men's room, furiously demanding to know "who this 'Kilroy' person is".
 * According to The Other Wiki, it was a meme created by the American soldiers who would draw a man's face peering at the person at the toilet with the inscriptions 'Kilroy Was Here'.
 * Kilroy Was Here, released 22 February 1983 by Styx as their eleventh album, left a subsequent generation wondering who exactly this Kilroy was. Jenny, on the other hand? In the Eighties, everyone knows her number.
 * In real life, much of the "For a good time call..." graffiti is merely a malicious prank, in which someone else's number is posted in the hopes of inundating them with misdial calls.
 * Conversely, in adventure-style video games, graffiti often will be used to hide in-universe clues which unlock some portion of the game.
 * Fictional works will tend to use 555 or other specific ranges that don't lead to an actual subscriber.
 * That said, for the best time call +1-613-745-1576.
 * Some businesses fully embrace the graffiti. One business and some universities even have blackboards and chalk in the stalls, as cleaning a blackboard is a lot easier (and a lot cheaper) than re-painting the stalls...or in cases of extreme damage, REPLACING the walls or fixtures.
 * There's at least one children's lavatory in (I think) England that has been decorated with characters and phrases from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. Not really scary or gross, unless you're creeped out by the idea of Pinkamena or Fluttershy staring at you while you relieve yourself.

Here I sit Broken hearted...