“Some privacy for crying out loud!”
Mr. Whipple started squeezing the Charmin when I was a young kid. I thought he was kind of creepy but perhaps he was just subversive. I think he’s dead and — as we all know — you’re supposed to say only good things about the dead.
Charmin — which makes one heck of a TP by the way(I’m in a dash mood)– has been definitely subversive with its animated bear commercials in which the large but lovable animals trek to the woods with a roll of toilet paper. I mean, it could be a coincidence that bears going to the woods with TP in paw was just something the ad people came up with and sold to Charmin. But I don’t think anything “just happens” in the advertising world. Surely they were going for the joke, that old retort of the most obvious: “Does a bear s**t in the woods?”
So I thought that if Basho was here today — and he’d be really old — perhaps he would celebrate in haiku the clever joke that the evil advertising geniuses developed to sell us squeezably soft Charmin. He would be much more eloquent than I, but here’s kind of a rough draft:
Bear goes to the woods
Takes a crap in the cold wind
Loves Charmin tissue.
Which raises a whole new question: “Does a bear wipe in 17 syllables, or perhaps 5-7-5?”