[Ads-l] No soap

[Jonathan Lighter]

I was told the joke in 1970-71. It involved a rhinoceros and something
else, maybe a hippo, taking a bath together. One asks, "Where's the soap."
The other replies, "No soap. Radio."

When I said, "Huh?" my NYU student interlocutor explained that the "joke"
wasn't really a joke. It was a psychological test for discovering how many
people would feel forced to laugh at a "joke" that was so obviously unfunny
and meaningless.

My memory banks recall two or three articles about "no soap" and even "no
soap radio" in American Speech long, long ago.

JL

On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 12:04 PM, Michael Quinion <
michael.quinion at worldwidewords.org> wrote:

> On 04/09/2016 14:14, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> The "no soap" link doesn't work for me
>>
>
> Apologies. It should of course have been http://www.worldwidewords.org/
> qa/qa-nos1.html . (The final letter was printed as a capital 'I' instead
> of a lower-case 'L'. On the font I'm using, the two are indistinguishable.)
>
>
>
> --
> Michael Quinion, World Wide Words
> http://www.worldwidewords.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org