Let’s Talk About Piss

The Pisser didn’t aim to unite us, but it happened anyway

Ashley Sudeta

From Labubus to whatever a Rizzler is supposed to be, navigating today’s world without TikTok can feel like being caught in the rain without an umbrella. If you’re a chronically offline UMN student, you might have found yourself asking what in God’s name “The Minnesota Pisser” is. The explanation is surprisingly simple. At the beginning of fall semester, TikTok user @minnesota.pisser posted their first video—a first-person point of view clip of them urinating on the grass behind Coffman Memorial Union at night. The footage is chilling. Ok, it’s actually not, and the “piss” is obviously just water from a water bottle, but I like dramatizing it.

In the first week of school, The Minnesota Pisser posted six videos and amassed over nine thousand followers. The comment section filled with students’ calls to establish a cast of heroes on campus and eventually identify the villain. Talk of The Pisser has spread beyond screens, though, and the joke has become a common topic of conversation among students. Strangers can connect over the phenomenon, bantering about where on campus The Pisser will be spotted next. It’s pure fun.

With today’s media largely relying on algorithms, people can live next door to each other and still consume drastically different informational and recreational content. Oftentimes something I view as a viral trend (Juggling Lab, anyone?) is completely obscure to even my close friends. However, even just for the first few weeks of class, The Pisser seems to have brought us back to the days of location-based media. Yes, it’s because TikTok has a scary amount of information about each of our personal lives, but we might as well try to make the best of our situation. It’s not often that social media creates anything human, and nothing’s more human than piss and spontaneous social connection.