Origin
The origin of the punchline remains mysterious, but it was circulating in a Philadelphia primary school by the early 1950s and in the suburbs of New York City as early as 1956–57.
The phrase "no soap" possibly originated around 1860, the time it was first recorded, meaning "I haven't any money" or "I will not lend you money." Its contemporary connotation is "not a chance" or "nothing doing." However, the phrase itself was being employed in an absurdist and humorous context as early as the 1750s, when it appeared in a well-known piece of nonsense prose improvised by the English dramatist and actor Samuel Foote in order to test the memory of a rival: "So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber..."
Read more about this topic: No Soap Radio
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)