Urinal Etiquette — Diagram and text explaining the mathematical efficiency of urinal selection protocol

Urinal Etiquette

2010exploitable imageclassic

Published October 4, 2026

Urinal Etiquette is a four-pane comic from 2010 that shows a man picking the urinal right next to a stranger when the whole row is empty. The anonymous image spent years bouncing around humor sites before Shaq posted it to Facebook in 2013, and later became a popular exploitable on Tumblr with the second character captioned to say absurd things.

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Overview

Urinal Etiquette is a four-panel comic built around a single awkward beat: one man uses a urinal in an otherwise empty men's room, a second man walks in, surveys the long row of free urinals, and then plants himself at the urinal directly next to the first guy1. The gag works because it violates the unwritten rule that strangers maximize distance at urinals, a convention catalogued in Urban Dictionary entries like 'use the farthest urinal from someone else that you possibly can'2.

The comic became an exploitable because the second man's intrusion is a blank slot you can fill with any socially awkward confession. The most-copied template has him turn and announce something, with Tumblr editors swapping in lines like declaring his veganism or revealing some other overshare3. The humor hangs on the mismatch between the private, no-talking norm of the men's room and the inappropriate oversharing coming from someone standing one urinal over.

It sits inside a longer internet conversation about bathroom protocol that also includes xkcd creator Randall Munroe's 2009 blog post 'Urinal Protocol Vulnerability,' which analyzed the seating problem mathematically4, and Kurt Nellis's 2006 PSA-style YouTube animation about urinal rules5.

Origin & Background

Platform
Capinaremos (Brazil) / Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2010

The original author of the comic is unknown. The earliest documented posting is from March 2, 2010 on the Brazilian humor site Capinaremos, under a post titled 'Isso é antiético' ('This is unethical,' translated from Portuguese)1. From there the image spread across non-English humor blogs through 2010 to 2013 before crossing into bigger English-speaking communities6.

The four panels follow a strict format: first panel, empty men's room with one guy at a urinal; second panel, a stranger enters; third panel, the stranger walks past every empty urinal; fourth panel, he settles in right next to the first man6. That rigid structure is what later made it easy to re-caption on Tumblr without redrawing anything.

How It Spread

After its 2010 Capinaremos appearance1, the image passed through dozens of humor sites in multiple languages over the next three years. The big English-language break came on January 2, 2013, when Shaquille O'Neal posted the comic to his Facebook page with the caption 'This is an automatic fight in my book…….LMFAO,' a post that drew heavy coverage after commenters piled in with homophobic replies7. Jezebel wrote up the Facebook post and the response the next day8.

On May 13, 2013, the comic was reposted to FunnyJunk under the title 'Maximum Overtroll,' which helped push it further into English meme circles9. The exploitable phase kicked off on October 6, 2015, when Tumblr user pi4nobl4ck posted an edited version in which the second man announces that he is vegan. That edit picked up more than 39,000 notes within two weeks3.

On October 15, 2015, the Tumblr meme research blog Meme Documentation flagged the format, and more re-captioned and photoshopped variants appeared through the rest of that month6.

Timeline

2006-07-12

Kurt Nellis uploads a PSA-style urinal etiquette animation to YouTube, an early online take on the topic[5].

2009-09-02

Randall Munroe publishes 'Urinal Protocol Vulnerability' on the xkcd blog, framing urinal choice as a math problem[4].

2010-03-02

The four-pane comic is posted to the Brazilian humor site Capinaremos, the earliest known appearance of the image[1].

2013-01-02

Shaquille O'Neal posts the comic to Facebook with 'This is an automatic fight in my book,' sparking news coverage of the replies[7].

2013-05-13

The image is reposted to FunnyJunk under the title 'Maximum Overtroll'[9].

2015-10-06

Tumblr user pi4nobl4ck posts a vegan-themed edit that collects over 39,000 notes in two weeks[3].

2015-10-15

Meme Documentation on Tumblr catalogs the exploitable, after which more remixes appear[6].

How to Use This Meme

The common convention is to leave the first three panels untouched and change only the final panel, usually by adding a speech bubble to the intruder. The joke typically works best when the line is something that would be weird to say to anyone, let alone a stranger mid-pee, like a political declaration, a dietary preference, or an unprompted personal confession3.

Frequently Asked Questions