Otto Titzling information

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Otto Titzling is a fictional character apocryphally described as the inventor of the brassière in the 1971 satire Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling by New Zealand humorist Wallace Reyburn. The character's name is a pun on "a two-tit sling".

Following the book's publication, by Macdonald in London and by Prentice-Hall in the USA, the hoax name has appeared in the game Trivial Pursuit (fooled by the hoax, the gamemakers listed Otto Titzling as the "correct answer" to the question of who invented the brassière), on the TV show Hollywood Squares in the late 1980s (John Davidson's first two mispronunciations of the name had to be bleeped for broadcast), in the 1984 pornographic film Intimate Couples (in which Joanna [Jacqueline Lorians] reads the Trivial Pursuit card shortly before the climactic orgy scene),^[1] in the 1988 movie Beaches (featuring the song "Otto Titsling" sung by Bette Midler), and in the comic strip Luann by Greg Evans.^[2]

Peter Cook references Otto Titzling as the inventor of the brassiere during a Pete and Dud skit with Dudley Moore, in their West End stage show Beyond the Fringe, first broadcast on BBC2 in 1974. The same network used Titzling in practice questions sent to prospective teams of University Challenge.

A similar myth persists with Thomas Crapper, a plumber with an overstated reputation regarding the flushing lavatory, as fictionalized by Reyburn in Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper.