Burma-Shave

Burma-Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems on small sequential highway roadside signs.

Burma-Shave sign series first appeared on U.S. Highway 65 near Lakeville, Minnesota, in 1926, and remained a major advertising component until 1963 in most of the contiguous United States.

[2] The exceptions were Nevada (deemed to have insufficient road traffic), and Massachusetts (eliminated due to that state's high land rentals and roadside foliage).

The puns include a play on the Maxwell House Coffee slogan, standard puns, and yet another reference to the "H" joke: The war years found the company recycling a lot of their old signs, with new ones mostly focusing on World War II propaganda: A 1944 advertisement in Life magazine ran: 1963 was the last year for the signs, most of which were repeats, including the final slogan, which had first appeared in 1953: A number of films and television shows set between the 1920s and 1950s have used the Burma-Shave roadside billboards to help set the scene.

Examples include Bonnie and Clyde, A River Runs Through It, The World's Fastest Indian, Stand By Me, Tom and Jerry, Rat Race, M*A*S*H and the pilot episode ("Genesis") of Quantum Leap.

The Flintstones episode "Divided We Sail" has Barney Rubble reading messages on a series of buoys that say, "If You're Queasy riding on the wave, just open your mouth.

Roger Miller's song "Burma Shave" (the B-side to his 1961 single "Fair Swiss Maiden") has the singer musing that he's "seen a million rows of them little red poetic signs up and down the line", while reciting rhymes in the manner of the ads.

The pedestrian passageway between the 42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal and Times Square–42nd Street stations in the New York City Subway system contains a piece of public art inspired by the Burma-Shave ads; Norman B. Colp's The Commuter's Lament, or A Close Shave consists of a series of signs attached to the roof of the passageway, displaying the following text:[12] Several highway departments in the United States use signs in the same style to dispense travel safety advice to motorists.

Several writers of doggerel and humorously bad poetry (such as David Burge) often use "Burma Shave" as the last line of their poems to indicate their non-serious nature.

[13] The term Burmashaving may specifically describe rural American highway signage in the form of a series of 5 rhyming stationary signs (a take-off of Burma-Vita ad campaigns beginning 1926+).