Last spring, Conan O’Brien ran a skit in which he was visited by the “Bowel Owl,” a giant owl who teaches the audience about owls and colon health. On Monday, for reasons known only to them, TBS released footage of what looks like a rehearsal for the show in which Conan meets the Bowel Owl for the very first time. Is this the most charming meet-cute since Singin’ in the Rain? Is it the most fateful first encounter since Stan Laurel met Oliver Hardy? Or is it, instead, a video we’ve posted simply to get the phrase the Bowel Owl into a headline?
And as long as we’re talking about the bowel owl, how many times can a single Slate post use the phrase bowel owl? According to Google, this is the first time this august online magazine has published the words bowel and owl next to each other. That’s 20 unbroken bowel owl free years in which no one, out of all of Slate’s thousands of writers, managed to work the words bowel owl into any of the hundreds of thousands of potentially bowel owl–related articles they handed in. Not even Christopher Hitchens! It may very well be the last time the phrase bowel owl appears in a Slate article—and, once my editors discover this bowel owl debacle, will almost certainly be the last time my byline does.
But as the famous adage goes, given the opportunity to publish the words bowel owl, one inevitably feels a certain sense of responsibility to get the words bowel owl onto the page as many times as humanly possible. After all, once you’ve published an article that is essentially an excuse to type bowel owl over and over again, like a deranged 2-year-old with a crayon (who has somehow learned to write the words bowel owl), it seems pretty unlikely that anyone will let you write for their website in the future, lest you scrawl the words bowel owl all over every page. So when a video of Conan O’Brien meeting the Bowel Owl for the first time is posted, it’s important not to waste your shot to publish the words bowel owl.
Bowel owl!
