Mr. Whipple

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"Ladies, please don't squeeze the Charmin!"

Mr. George Whipple is a fictional supermarket manager featured in television advertisements that ran in the United States from 1965 to 1989 for Charmin toilet paper. In unvarying repetition, he scolds women who "squeeze the Charmin," while hypocritically entertaining such actions himself.

The very first commercial sets the tone. He is seen looking off camera at a female customer, commenting that first she's squeezing the grapefruits, then she's squeezing the melons, and then (in a classic comic "triple") when she gets to the Charmin, that's the last straw, and he walks over to her and utters his famous plea for the first time.

In the late seventies and early eighties, a competitor named Hoffmeyer came along, who encouraged his customers to squeeze the Charmin, and scolded Whipple on his hypocrisy.

According to Charmin makers Procter & Gamble, a 1978 survey found that "Mr. Whipple" was the third best-known American, behind only recently-ousted President Richard Nixon and preacher Billy Graham.

By the late 1980s, Mr. Whipple was encouraging customers who weren't buying Charmin to squeeze it. One commercial had him use a fishing rod to put it in a skeptic's cart.

He was played by actor Dick Wilson, a character actor who had played a recurring role on the television series Bewitched. A new series of Charmin commercials featuring him was filmed in 1999, with the new slogan, "Is Mr. Whipple watching?".

In 1985, the title track of "Weird Al" Yankovic's Dare to Be Stupid contained the lyric, "you better squeeze all the Charmin you can when Mr. Whipple's not around." Bob Rivers and Twisted Radio's "Deck the Halls"/Michael Jackson parody "Grahbe Yabalz" contains the line "Squeeze your buns like Mr. Whipple."

Not to be confused with the Nobel Prize-winning physician, George Hoyt Whipple.

In the nineties, he returned to Charmin with various commercials involving why he could not re-retire (the answer being he had to inform the public about Charmin). He was eventually replaced with the Charmin bears.