Architecture and construction employ specific terminology: bricks are rectangular units, columns are vertical supports. The joke inverts the scale and category: instead of waste product being transformed into small modular units, waste product is transformed into load-bearing structural elements. It's not just quantity but functional category shift—excrement becoming architecture.

A contractor named David Wells documented unusual jokes circulating among construction crews during the 1980s, and noted this particular formulation as exemplary of inverted expectation humor. Wells theorized that the appeal lay in the radical category violation: the suggestion that products of human consumption could be repurposed into structural systems.

The image appeals through absurdist inversion: instead of architecture being separate from bodily process, architecture becomes embodiment of bodily process. The structural integrity of the edifice becomes analogous to the structural integrity of human systems. It's humor derived from category confusion: the reduction of grand structures to visceral bodily function, the suggestion that infrastructure and excrement occupy related categories.