Even though I missed most of the game on Sunday, thanks to friends and incessant TV blather I have now seen most of the Super Bowl commercials. Some were funny, but for the most part I thought the majority of them had the faint patina of trying too hard. There seemed to be a certain desperation about the spots that smacked of too many vice-presidents overseeing the creative process and urging their charges to "be funny". The only problem with that is that management is NEVER funny; not even close. They're dweebs, that's why they're vice-presidents.
Humor is like pornography. You can't describe what makes it so...it just is. It either makes you laugh or it doesn't. Or, in the case of pornography, it either makes you... Let's come back to that another time.
An important element of humor that some of the unfunny folks who have given us the nonsense of "political correctness" fail to grasp is that ALL HUMOR IS OFFENSIVE. If you want ten people to laugh, at least one other person has to be on the receiving end of the shiv in the ribs. Comedy is a way of allaying anxiety and adversity without denying its cause. It is in the gap between what we demand of the world and what the world delivers that laughter flourishes.
One of the best Super Bowl commercials, in my opinion, was the Snickers spot where the two auto mechanics accidentally kiss while eating the same candy bar; then rip out some chest hair to do something "manly". The Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation complained to the Snickers people and BAM...the commercial is vapor.
Radio great Jean Shepherd said it best: "Comedy is always offensive. If you don't offend somebody you're not being funny. Only Americans worry about it."
1 comment:
Speaking of vice presidents.......I was shopping for groceries and went to the meat counter (yes, I eat meat and those who don't like that fact will just have to live with it) and someone had moved the hamburger from it's usual place in the counter. They hadn't changed the signs yet so it was a bit confusing. So I asked the butcher who was standing there what was up. He told me that one of the execs that does the marketing thing had decided that moving the hamburger four feet to the right where the steaks had usually been placed made marketing sense. Of course, that meant that the steaks were where the hamburger had been in the counter. Wow! What clever thinking. It dawned on me why my grocery bill keeps increasing; it's because the grocery chain is paying some person to move the meat around. Now I know why I was never a real big success; I never learned to move the meat around.
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