Toilet paper commercials are nutty. They’re an interesting dimension of how we get nervous about anything naked, screwing, peeing, or pooping. But they’re still nutty.

Quilted Northern used to have a string of commercials starring animated seamstresses who actually stitched up the toilet paper by hand. It always seemed like the commercial was designed to make Quilted Northern out to be a mom-and-pop toilet paper business, where well-paid workers took pride in making their billowy product by hand. This was in sharp contrast to the toilet paper company next door, which made its flat, boring, hard-on-the-a** toilet paper using steamrollers and tuba music.

The commercials made no sense. How on earth and WHY on earth would you spend money setting up a labor-intensive operation with high overhead in order to make a product that people use solely for wiping their a**? Under such a ridiculous business model, the company would fold and the seamstresses would be forced to beg for work in Toilet Paper Town.

Then there’s Charmin. Like Quilted Northern, Charmin’s ads use animated characters rather than real butt-wipers. But Charmin circumvents the whole taboo subject of butt-wiping people entirely. Instead, the commercials star a mama bear and baby bear, apparently off in the woods pooping while Goldilocks samples their porridge and beds. As the bears prance about in the forest, they lament the woes of generic bathroom tissue, fighting discomfort and small pieces of tissue left on their hairy backsides. But their irritation soon melts away to the pure JOY of using Charmin brand bathroom tissue. Mama bear shows her boundless satisfaction by buffing her bottom with a swath of tissue the size of a bath towel. So...what’s the take-away? If you have an EXTREMELY hairy a**, subsist on a diet of berries and salmon, and wipe up like you wash a car, then Charmin might be the right brand for you.

Of course, the theme that runs straight through all toilet paper commercials is the blue liquid. The blue liquid is meant to represent the...well, I’m not quite sure. Whatever it is, it’s used as a way to compare absorbency of different kinds of toilet paper. I’m guessing blue was used because it’s the only basic color that doesn’t actually show up in the bathroom. Yellow, red, brown, black, and green all give some impression of “YUCK” or “HEALTH PROBLEM.” But at what point during a trip to the bathroom does liquid DUMP out of you onto a pile of toilet paper? If you need that kind of absorbency, then you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Well, toilet paper industry, what if I want a hand-stitched bath tissue that can gobble up a liter of blue liquid AND scrub up my giant bear butt? Get crackin’.