Oh, go ahead, squeeze the Charmin
Even now -- in the era of erectile-dysfunction television commercials or teenage girls extolling the latest in cardboard-applicator tampons -- we still don’t quite know how to advertise something as simple as toilet paper. That whole area remains the great conundrum of Madison Avenue, which is how we wound up with singing toilets that just got super-scrubbed, and the Ty-D-Bol man, and the depiction of any and all bodily fluids as being bright blue. All sorts of anthropomorphic creatures populate the throne room in lieu of frank talk. For a long time, to demonstrate how wonderful toilet paper is, people in commercials rubbed it against their . . . faces.
Mr. Whipple, the fictional supermarket manager who for 21 years implored his handsy customers to “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin,” seemed creepily overprotective of the product. In our ongoing misinterpretation of Freud, Mr. Whipple would today be accused of being too anal about it.
Dick Wilson, the actor who played Mr. Whipple in more than 500 Charmin commercials from 1964 to 1985, died Monday at age 91 at a hospital for ailing movie and television actors in the San Fernando Valley. He’d done other parts, in sitcoms, but showbiz can only be counted on to give a guy one sure thing, if he’s lucky, and Wilson got to be Mr. Whipple forever.
Wilson died on what just happened to be World Toilet Day, in which global health advocates and public bathroom accessibility proponents annually remind us that not even 20% of the planet’s population enjoys daily access to a clean, working toilet -- to say nothing of “squeezably soft” rolls of tissue.
In other words, Americans are an incalculably comfortable (and comfort-seeking) people, and we would probably be horrified to reencounter whatever toilet paper must have felt like in 1964. Mr. Whipple patrolled one of those supermarkets no one would go to anymore unless he had to, the medium-size independent store that knew not of eco-aware branding. Mr. Whipple loved to catch customers in the act of (egad!) touching things. Mr. Whipple would not do well in today’s world of the Customer Is Always Right.
The customer is now allowed to touch and probe and sample just about anything. The customer buys toilet paper in 48-roll packs at Costco. The customer changed, and so did TP, with its embroidered layers, its soothing ridges and (to the horror of plumbers everywhere) the addition of lotion several years ago. Toilet paper has plumped up just as we have -- double rolls, triple rolls, so fat that home contractors have had to upsize the wall-inset dispensers in new master baths. To wander down Mr. Whipple’s former paper-products aisle is to consider the expanding frontier of advertising’s idea of “fresh.” They sell baby wipes for grown-ups now, for an even fresher feeling. Mr. Whipple’s simple, two-ply, four-roll pack of Charmin is the most difficult item to find.
Lately toilet paper ads have been about pastel-hued cartoon bears who have a toilet-paper dispenser mounted on a nearby tree. The bears make Mr. Whipple seem that much more real and so much less weird. Of all the things we have no shame in discussing in 2007 -- where Oprah Winfrey routinely tells Dr. Mehmet Oz about the current shape of her excrement -- we seem to be getting more distant from Mr. Whipple’s fussy intrusions, his fastidious way of changing the subject. “Don’t squeeze the Charmin,” he said, which of course meant “do.”
So long, Mr. Whipple, master of reverse psychology. Thanks to you, we squeezed it like nobody’s business.
