Friday, November 6th, 2009 Arlo & Janis. Free toilet paper?
Well. Our great-grandparents often shopped via the Sears catalog, which was often hung up in the outhouse after it had been replaced with a new one and served as toilet paper. I assume that’s what the comic is referencing.
Ah ha! I’ll bet your right. Thanks! 
Anyone familiar with today’s glossy, full-colour ones will be confused as to how they could be used as toilet paper.
Ah yes, a good joke for the audience over 60. =\
If you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny.
Not funny to the person you have to explain it to. If most people get it, then it is funny. It’s only when most people don’t that you could call it unfunny.
As a rule that would pretty much eliminate every joke, 'cause somebody somewhere’s not gonna get it.
No soap. Radio.
Not always, I know a lot of young people (under 25) that watch “All In The Family,” and think it is very funny. I don’t get this. I think the show is funny too, but it’s so dated and topical, I would think young people would be hard pressed to get the jokes. But I guess Watergate is still funny to young people
Maybe over 85 - a 60-year old today was born in 1949, when toilet paper was pretty much universal.
I’m in my 40s and I got the joke. Something doesn’t have to have occurred in your lifetime for you to know about it.
Nice!
I’m in my 30s, and I got it.
Using the Sears/Eaton’s catalogue as toilet paper once it’s no longer useful as a catalogue isn’t exactly an obscure fact. Most of us know (or knew) someone who grew up doing it.
I got it, but I had to think about it for a while.
Now THAT’S funny!
I had to look it up, because when I heard the joke (as a child in the single digits) the punch line was ‘What do you think I am? A typewriter?’ Curiously, I haven’t heard it since.
On wiki, there is this quote:
Does the line actually refer to the ‘joke’? Or does it refer to ‘soap’ as a term from the mid-19th Century meaning ‘money’, or from ‘Nothing doing’ meaning of the mid-20th Century?
What the hell are you people talking about? This is just bizarre.
BTW, I’m 26.
There was a era, long ago, nearly lost in the mists of time, when toilet paper did not exist. People have used all sorts of things to wipe themselves over the centuries – leaves and scraps of cloth and whatnot. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, another sort of paper, in the form of hefty Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck catalogs, started appearing in every homestead through-out the land! Much rejoicing was heard in outhouses from sea to shining sea, when people began to realize that the pages of last season’s catalog made a handy, free, and disposable substitute for said rags and leaves and whatnot. So, the catalogs were prized for allowing people to order any possible thing they might need for themselves or their household, AND for being the gift that kept on giving by allowing them to wipe their arse with something a little more pleasant than a wad of leaves.