Popular Culture
Over the years the joke has become widely known and entered popular culture in other forms, including a shower radio labeled "No Soap-Radio!" on a The Simpsons episode ("Homer the Heretic"), a popular podcast named after the joke, and a band with the name appearing at the Crazy Horse on a The Sopranos episode ("Pie-O-My"). It has been used as the name for rock bands, as well as a short-lived TV sketch comedy show (à la Monty Python's Flying Circus) starring Steve Guttenberg that aired on ABC in the spring of 1982. It can also be seen in the movie Training Day with a joke/metaphor referencing a snail that climbs onto a man's porch. GameFAQs' 2010 April Fool's joke consisted of a poll with the phrase as a hidden choice. There even exists a line of bath and body products under the name "Not Soap, Radio".
No Soap Radio was also the name of a successful radio commercial production company in New York City formed in 1970. Because of its activity as a music company creating tracks for TV as well as radio, it changed its name in the early 1980s to No Soap Productions and is still active as of 2012.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s "No Soap Radio" was used among college students as a nickname for public radio, including college stations. Such radio had no commercials and was thus not like "Soap Operas" which did carry commercial advertisement.
Read more about this topic: No Soap Radio
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)