Upset that your friends are all traveling to exotic locales this spring break while you rot at home? Why not take a trip up your own ass? If you weren’t blessed with a colossal colon of your own, then be sure to check out the Colossal Colon, a four-foot-wide, 40-foot-long replica of the human colon on display in Freedom Plaza through Saturday. Washington, D.C. is just the first stop in the colon’s upcoming nine-month, 20-city tour, a tour which, for those of you counting, is longer than the latest Creed tour. Except the Creed tour had more giant assholes.
As you would expect, the giant colon was manufactured in Alexandria by the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation. While there is nothing funny about colon cancer, there is something funny about raising awareness of the disease by making a giant, rubber model of the colon and letting people crawl through it. It’s hard to imagine organizers thinking they will be taken seriously, as experience has shown us repeatedly building giant, foam-rubber replicas of parts of your ass isn’t always the best way to get a message across.
“Raising awareness” is typically acomplished by providing people with small, subtle amounts of information to get them casually interested. A chance to tour a giant model of a colon seems like an event only the most committed of the colon cognoscenti would attend. But hey, maybe they’ll prove us wrong. Or maybe they’ll just make us laugh until we throw up. Either way, we’d like to see similar exhibits in the future for other diseases like testicular cancer (colossal blue balls) or goiters (colossal neck glands)—all for the sake of awareness.
Visitors to the event are given a passport, which they take to different stations, getting them stamped when they have completed each one. Just like Christ’s stations of the cross, the stations of the colon are structured to be fun and informative. They include such actual ones as “Your Colon, Your Rectum: What They’re All About,” “Colon Cancer: What You Need to Know,” and some invented ones like “Colon Cancer: What You Don’t Need to Know” and “Ouch! My Ass is on Fire!”
So don’t feel like you have to travel to have a good time this spring break—fun and adventure can be as close as your own ass.
