Pissing on the Boss's Head (Copylore)

The entire front page of Forward, vol, 1, no. 14, June 1973, was devoted to a cartoon of a GI who is standing on the desk of a Sergeant Major (if I’m reading his insignia correctly) while pissing on his head. The NCO calmly remarks, “It’s this sort of thing, Farble, that's keeping you from making Sp4.” The cartoon made a second appearance in vol. 1, no. 53, Jan. 1977, of this newsletter published by the G.I. Counselling Center in Berlin, Germany, and it was reprinted in some other underground newspapers of the era (e.g., Fifth Estate (Detroit), vol. 8, no. 15, Oct. 27-Nov. 9, 1973, p. 3; Bragg Briefs (Spring Lake, NC), vol. 7, no. 1, 1974, p. 2; and Left Face! (Washington, DC), vol. 1, no. 4, August 1976, p. 3). 

A more crudely drawn variant is spread over two pages of Omega Press (Koza, Okinawa, Japan), vol. 3, no. 1, 1 Jan. 1974, p. 20. (All of the aforementioned sources can be found at Independent Voices.)

 

Semper Fi (Marine Corps Air Station, Iwakuni, Japan), vol. 6, no. 4, 14 March 1975, p. 7. This cartoon accompanies an article about one Mike Reagan, a junior Marine in the WES-17 Air Squadron who was thrown in the brig for refusing to get a haircut.

Your Military Left (San Antonio, TX), vol. 3, no. 2, 1973, p. 8. A cartoon accompanying an article, which originally appeared in The Overseas Weekly, 23 April 1973, on a class action suit by the ACLU against urine testing in the armed services. 

Two similar cartoons in a business setting are collected in Alan Dundes & Carl Pagter, Sometimes the Dragon Wins (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 30-1. In both cartoons, the boss being doused surmises that his employee has won the lottery.  

Sometimes, the employee, having won the lottery, or just fed up with his job, pisses on his own desk and exclaims, “I quit!” (See, for example, Dundes & Pagter, When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 169).

Uli Kutter, “ ‘Ich Kündige’: Zu einer Folklore der Imponderabilien,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 77 (1981), 243-61: 256.