Nobby's Piles

Nobby's Piles is the name of a cartoon in the British comic Viz. It is one of the longest running strips, having been appearing with some regularity since the mid-1980s.

Nobby is a middle-aged man who suffers from chronic haemorrhoids. In each episode he endures repeated injury to his bottom by terrible accidents. He has been impaled on a church spire after a parachute jump, had his hemorrhoids stabbed by the rock pick of a mountain climber, fallen into a skip full of broken glass and slid down a rusty metal banister. The contrived ways in which these incidents are set up include Nobby's wife trying to apply some hemorrhoid ointment to her husband whilst in a darkened caravan, trying to distinguish between two bottles labelled 'Pile Ointment' and 'Devil's Brand Hell-Fire Jalapeno Sauce - Bang! Bang! Molto Explosivo!'. Nobby's agonies often cause him to shoot into the air screaming.

The cartoon provides endless slang words for hemorrhoids, such as "bum-grapes", Emmas - Emma Freuds, Clements - Clement Freuds or Sigmunds - Sigmund Freuds and various other examples of Cockney rhyming slang;

• Chalfonts - Chalfont St Giles
• Farmers - Farmer Giles
• Nobbys - Nobby Stiles
• Badmintons - Badminton horse trials
• Ceramics - Ceramic tiles
• Nurembergs - Nuremberg Trials
• Rockfords - The Rockford Files
• Nauticals - Nautical Miles
• Lever-Arches - Lever-Arch Files
• Adrians - Adrian Chiles

In one episode, after his hemorrhoids were removed by a surgeon, he awakens puzzled saying "I can still feel them". The surgeon responds; "Fortunately a donor was found, and we transplanted his Farmers onto your bum. They'll throb like buggery until the stitches come out... and after that they'll just throb like buggery!"