Burma-Shave and Its Signs: Rhyming Humor in Outdoor Advertising

Speaker: Margaret Opsata

Amusing roadside poems promoting a brushless shaving cream — Burma-Shave — brightened the journey for drivers from the 1920s to the 1960s.  The signs elevated outdoor advertising from a boring business to an art form. Revisiting the folksy sequential verses lets modern audiences explore some of the cultural landmarks and sources of humor that prevailed in mid-20th-Century America, and the advertising landscape in which they played a key part.