You hear this line in the old movies, but I’m not sure I have ever seen a tiparillo.
What are tiparillos? Are they still widely sold–and popular? What is the user demographic?
I see them all the time at a local quickie mart. I’ve tried one or two in the past.
The end of it doesn’t get all wet and chewed up like a regular 'gar does. Unless you’re into biting on plastic.
Cheap small-medium cigars with a plastic tip. Now big with black men. However, the plastic apparently makes it easier to inhale the cigar smoke- which is not a good thing.
Carnac the Magnificent! writes:
> Cigars? Cigarettes? Tiparillos? Um, What Happened to Tiparillos?
>
> You hear this line in the old movies, but I’m not sure I have ever seen a tiparillo.
>
> What are tiparillos? Are they still widely sold–and popular? What is the user
> demographic?
This is a somewhat strange question. Was this line ever used in any movie? I’m pretty sure that Tiparillo is a brand name. I don’t believe that this line was ever used in a movie. If you remember it, it’s because you remember the Tiparilllos TV advertisements of the 1960’s. The advertisements show a cigarette girl (do those even exist anymore?) wandering through a nightclub, holding a tray of tobacco products before here which she would sell to the customers. As she walked, she would say, “Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos.” I suspect the subtext of the advertisements was “Hey, Tiparillos are classy items, sold with premium cigarettes and cigars.” I further suspect that this was never true, and in fact Tiparillos were always low-class products.
Indeed, I think the movie line was "cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos.
Cigarillos are small filter-tipped cigars – they look exactly like a cigarette except for the tobacco wrap (I assume it’s tobacco. It’s brown and looks like tobacco.)
There are still a few of those around. Winchester is the brand I see most around here.
The line that I remember from commercials is definitely “Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos”:
http://tvacres.com/tobacco_slogans.htm
When I Google on “cigars cigarettes cigarillos”, I get a few hits. In each case though, it’s just part of a list of tobacco products. Does anyone remember any specific movies in which either of the lines “Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos” or “Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos” appears? If you say it sounds vaguely familiar, but you don’t remember a specific movie, I suspect that you’re just remembering the commercial.
I’m probably alive because of Tiparillos. I decided to quite smoking after two successive sessions with bronchial pneumonia. The second time I decided to smoke Tiparillos because I wouldn’t inhale the smoke. I thought they were so awful that after a trying a couple I threw rest away and decided that no smoking at all was preferable to that.
I was a 2-3 pack a day man and probably would be long since dead but for Tiparillos.
I’m confused, but want to add a few things…there is a difference (at least around here) between cigarellos and little cigars…basically, little cigars are like cigarettes, but 100s, and usually taste like a cheap cigar. My father smokes Winchester Little Cigars…not half as bad as the swishers…also, cigarellos (where I live) are sold to many stoners…basically because they are smaller than shells (normal single blunts) and cheaper by pack than papers/wraps…I worked at a carryout…we carried cigarettes, about every kind you can imagine; cigarellos, usually just swishers or black/mild fastbreaks; Tips…which meant black/mild regulars, apples, or the swisher plastic (or wood) tips; and blunt shells, regular blunts that were relatively cheap…
also, we carried tubes, which are cigar rolling papers that could come in any flavor…we carried about 50 flavors from french vanilla and peach cognac to mild and peach…
hope that all helps…
Matthew1 writes:
> hope that all helps…
It doesn’t. I can’t make any sense what you’ve written. Look, could you please give us a one-sentence definition of each of the following terms?:
Cigars
Cigarettes
Cigarillos
Little Cigars
Swishers
Tips
Blunts
Shells
Tubes
Please give each definition as a separate paragraph. Don’t run the sentences together with three dots. That’s not only ungrammatical, it makes for incomprehensible posts.
[William Shatner]
But…that would…make sense…? Damn it, Spock!
[/Williams Shatner]
Tut, tut old man, I’m certain I’ve heard this line in movies, but can’t cite. It was indeed quite popular in the old advertising days–or so I’ve been told. Before my time, eh Wat?
“Tiparillo Theme (Cigars, Cigarettes, Tiparillos)”
[Robert Burns Tiparillos]
words and music by Clay Warnick;
Copyright by General Cigar Co, Inc.
© Nov. 29, 1962; EP 170 036.
http://www.classicthemes.com/50sTVThemes/thoseOldJingles.html
Tiparillos “Cigars? Cigarettes? Tiparillos?” (1964)
“Should a gentleman offer a Tiparillo to a lady?”
http://tvacres.com/tobacco_slogans.htm
Cigars, Cigarettes, Tiparillos? Hell, yes. Nightclubs used to have Playboy Bunny types walking around with wooden shelves strapped to their magnificently sculpted backs, full of tobacco product. Right to your table. Lung dart, monsieur? Shore! Thankee, baby!
http://www.velociworld.com/Velociblog/Oldvelocity/000294.html
Tampa Nuggets were similar products, with a wooden tip instead of a plastic one. They were almost mild enough to inhale for the “average” cigarette smoker. Tiparillos were just another variety of smoking products of the period and the ads for them were designed to move people away from either cigars or cigarettes to the ostensibly fashionable alternative. I can’t recall any particular success of the ad campaign and I doubt if it ran more than a year or two in its heyday. (I could be wrong, of course, as I’m going purely from memory.)
For the real student of alternative smoking products, there were also Between The Acts and Picayunes which were heavy duty cigarette-looking things that were at least as strong as some full-sized cigars. I knew several hard-core smokers who preferred them. I tried them and almost gagged. But then I was partial to filter-tipped cigarettes like Winston and Salem and their rivals. Even Camels and Lucky Strikes were too strong for me.
It would be a strange list to produce of all the brands of cigars and cigarettes and their offshoots that have been produced for mass consumption. I’d wager it would run into the thousands.
[Sidelight]The Army camps in France through which troops were funneled to and from the US and Britain in WWII were named, Twenty Grand, Phillip Morris, Lucky Strike, etc. All the names of cigarettes of the time.[/sidelight]
Stuff I can help with…
Swishers - These are a brand name of machine-rolled (mass-produced) cigars. They come in many varieties and are popular with the hip-hop crowd, for some reason. (Personally, I was never a fan.) They come in different styles - “Swisher Sweets” are popular, for example.
Tips - Wooden or plastic mouthpieces that come attached to cigars, kind of like a very short pipe stem. “Tiparillos” are a brand, I think from Swisher, of small cigars (about finger-sized) that come with tips on them. It’s a pun on “cigarillo,” which, I believe, is just a small cigar.
To add to your sidelight, I remember reading (can’t cite a source – sorry) that it was a WWI phenomenon that doughboys were treated to free cigarettes during the war years (and perhaps afterward while they were still in the service). This contributed to the rapid expansion of cigarette smoking and the ultimate addiction by several generations to tobacco. The TV ads during the 50’s and early 60’s until the advent of the Surgeon General’s warnings made smoking not only acceptable but desirable. There were even doctors (probably not real doctors but guys who played doctors on TV 
) advocating some brand over others for its “healthy” attributes.
If there’s been a bigger corporate scam on the nation’s health than the tobacco one, I need to know about it.
Neither of my parents smoked and none of my aunts, but most of my uncles and one of my grandfathers were smokers. Most of my high school classmates and college fellows (male and female) smoked. It was the thing to do in those days.
I have quit several times. Most recently about two years ago. The only excuse I ever had after I turned 30 was weight control. There’s a neat ad running these days that addresses that aspect of smoking.
End of sidelight.
Carnac the Magnificent!, all those websites you give are references to the commercials. Did you even notice that one of them is the same website that I gave in my second post? That’s not independent evidence that the line was used anywhere except in the commercials. I still think that you’re remembering the commercials and mistakenly thinking that your memory comes from a movie. Does anyone remember a specific movie that this line comes from?
In WWII every ration box,K, C, D contained cigarettes and matches. In the PX overseas cigarettes were 5 cents a pack.
I doubt if this line was ever uttered in an old movie. It’s entirely from a commercial. Not that the commercial might not have been parodied afterwards, sure.
If you poke around a bit, you find that the US military didn’t eliminate cigarettes from the field rations until 1975. In the WWII era, they probably felt it was no worse than including chewing gum or bar of chocolate. Yeah, not exactly GOOD for you, but if we can easily provide a small pleasure for the poor sod out there in the mud getting shot at, it’s worth doing, for morale if nothing else. As Surgeon General’s reports started piling up, it took them a couple of decades to do away with something that had been a bit of a tradition.
Advertising contributed heavily to the tobacco problem long before the 50s and 60s. One of the triumphs in the career of Edward Bernays, sometimes called “The Father of Public Relations”, was a campaign mounted in the 1920s to make it acceptable for women to smoke in public. He did so by making it an emancipation issue, as well as giving free reign to Freudian erotic fantasies:
(To be fair to Bernays, in 1929 he couldn’t have known that cigarettes were all that harmful, and in the mid-1950s, when he had to confront the mounting evidence of health risks, he stopped working for the tobacco companies and became a vocal critic of tobacco, attempting unsuccesfully to get PR professional organizations to urge their members to stop promoting it.)