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| Tom Bosley, Erin Moran, and Marion Ross on Happy Days. |
Plumbing is funny. It just is. Especially when it breaks. The bathroom is already the least-dignified part of any home -- think of all the embarrassing things you do in there -- and when those toilets overflow or those pipes burst and water starts going everywhere, the hilarity increases exponentially. Comedians have known this for generations. That's why the Three Stooges did plumbing shorts with both Curly and Shemp.
It took television a while to be cool with plumbing-based humor. It was a big deal when a toilet was shown on Leave it to Beaver in the 1950s, even though it wasn't being used for its normal function. (I believe Wally and the Beav were keeping a turtle in a toilet tank.) In the 1970s, the Brady Bunch house had a single bathroom for six kids but no (visible) toilet. When she was a panelist on Match Game, Suzanne Somers claimed that she couldn't even say the word "toilet" on Three's Company. At the other end of the spectrum, All in the Family got a big laugh by letting the audience hear Archie Bunker flushing the upstairs john.
Like the Brady manse, the Cunningham house on Happy Days only had one bathroom, but it was the site of some memorable moments. I remember some heart-to-heart talks between Richie (Ron Howard) and Howard (Tom Bosley) taking place there, for instance. The bathroom is also a major location in the episode "The Cunningham Caper." But Happy Days didn't really engage in any full-on, Three Stooges-style "exploding plumbing" humor until the Season 11 episode "You Get What You Pay For" in which Howard finally decides to install a second bathroom in his 4,000-square-foot home.
And what a coincidence! That's the very episode we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.