4 Commercials That Insult Dagger’s Intelligence
We’ve heard from Limon, and we’ve heard from Hart, so I figured I might as well chime in with four commercials that insult my intelligence as well. I’ve listed the four below along with an honorable mention so hated among the masses (even my dear sweet mother), that I thought it unfair to include in such an illustrious list. So let’s get to it. Here are four (five) commercials that call my acumen’s mother a whore.
Honorable Mention: Jared The Galleria of Jewelry – He Went to Jared
I planned to rant on this, but when I went to YouTube to find the commercial, not only could I not find it anywhere, there were already somewhere between 300 and 2,000 parodies of this commercial (depending on which search terms you used) pointing out the inherent mind-numbing idiocy of these commercials rendering me late to the party. But just for fun, let’s examine why everyone so ruthlessly scoffs at these ads anyway.
As you all know from seeing these commercials a zillion times, some douche fart wants to impress his lady friend, and goes to the mall jeweler to buy her some blood diamond that African tribal leaders likely sold to Jared Jewelers ostensibly to keep their impoverished villagers in hellish servitude for eternity and embolden their already unbreakable chokehold on third world poverty while dorky white dudes try to trade diamonds for blowjobs from their frigid hedgehog girlfriends.
Anyway, the woman excitedly declares “He Went to Jared!” as the phrase makes its way around the rest of the commercial’s cast like an escalating game of telephone where the next person illogically seems even more excited than the last. The men in the telephone game are either in the know and nod approvingly, or in one case, the most obnoxious case, one juvenile asshole mockingly and childishly cries out with the face of an insolent toddler, “He went to Jared, pleccchh…”
OK, first of all, I realize Jared is trying build a brand for itself where mere name recognition inspires reactions of reverence with a tinge of jealousy like, “Wow, he bought a Rolls Royce!” or “Wow, he fucked Blake Lively!” but when you can find Jared Jewelers in the mall between a Cinnabon and a Hold Everything, you’re not fooling anyone with your delusions of grandeur, Jared. You’re a shitty mall jeweler just like the rest of them. Secondly, to the pouty asshole who’s upset our protagonist went to Jared and mocks the entire thing… how do you think your wife feels? She’s obviously impressed by whatever half-assed flaw-ridden piece of crap on a rope he bought his woman from Jared, and judging by your reaction, you can’t even do that much. Maybe you should learn to fuck her right, you turd mouth, and spring for a gift once in a while besides that homemade coupon book you give her every anniversary for a free back rub. Although if that bitch has any sense, she’ll leave you, your tighter than a nun’s pussy purse strings, and your pencil dick to drink daiquiris in the sun while getting fucked by young black studs who shower her with attention leaving you to make your impudent little faces at family gatherings lonely, broke, and miserable.
The whole exercise of sitting through a Jared commercial is exhausting and infuriating at the same time because the psychology of everyone involved (including me) is just so bizarrely idiotic. I hate the people in the Jared commercials, but I hate the guy who hates the guy who actually went to Jared more. You’d think we’d be on the same team, but somehow he’s even stupider than the rest of them.
Capital One Card Lab – Spaghetti Jimmy
The general conceit of this commercial is that instead of having some pre-ordained photo chosen by the credit card overlords put on your plastic gateway to debt paradise, you can have a friendly reminder of happier times each time you make a purchase. Fine, I guess. This isn’t something I want as I spend enough time thinking about useless shit as it is, I don’t need to change the background on my credit card I see for maybe a grand total of 45 seconds a day, if that. But hey, if Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and just walking around in the world aren’t enough ways for you to loudly display your personality, by all means, put a picture on your goddamn credit card too. I don’t care.
What I really hate about this commercial is that parents often fail to realize that the rest of us don’t want to see their kids being disgusting. I understand thinking everything your child does is adorable, but think about if that was some other moron’s kid with pasta all over his dome. You’d think, “Hey, terrific, but that might be one for the family album. I’m not interested in seeing your kid look like a cute little retard. For her personalized Capital One credit card, mom chooses a picture of a young Jimmy sitting in a high chair, face covered with Ragu, spaghetti all over his head and asks, “How cute is that?”
Not at all, bitch. Unless it’s a photo in a photo album of a kid sticking his face in a cake on his first birthday, which is the only cute picture of a kid failing to eat properly in existence, no one wants to see your kid covered anything he was supposed to have ingested. Now you get to subject several unwitting counter jockeys a day to this foulness with the added bonus of humiliating your just-about-to-begin-puberty son at will. Kids are generally hyper-sensitive about their appearance, and you’ve just put him on the cusp of a panic attack every time he’s with you at the store. Congratulations, mom. Don’t be surprised in five years when Jimmy comes home with his ear pierced, won’t tell you about his day anymore, and spends most of his time wearing a black hoodie drawn way over his face on his way to sulk in his room between Marlboro Lights he crushes out behind the garage.
When I think about marriage from an exclusively personal standpoint, nothing about it is even remotely frightening. Yet, advertisers seem hell bent on portraying marriage as negatively as possible for no good reason. Comedian Nick DiPaolo does a riff on this in his stand-up act where he hates computer commercials because they all seem to progress in the same way – Dad fumbles around with some technical aspect of the new family computer that his heroic wife or kid comes in, gives Dad the old “Oh Dad” face as Dad forces a helpless smile. Then the tagline “So simple, even Dad can use it.” ends the exercise in humiliation. DiPaolo’s response: “Yeah, Dad can’t use it. Ha ha. By the way, do you mean the guy who bought you the fucking thing, you ungrateful twats?” Because really, if you’re going to portray Dad as the lovable but bumbling fool, you should really acknowledge the other half of that stereotype and make him the sole breadwinner again because apparently our understanding of gender roles hasn’t progressed in 50 years.
I remember the above bit from at least 7 years ago. So here we are in 2009, and a woman chats on the phone with one of her friends about how she succumbed to weakness and had an apple turnover today despite her diet. Her dopey looking husband overhears this and scrambles to the fridge presumably looking for any remnants of an apple turnover in a sad commentary on what a short leash his wife keeps him on because his frantic search seems to indicate she hasn’t bought anything fun to eat in at least 6 months and he can’t make a decision without her. Meanwhile, she rattles off eating boston crème pie, chocolate-covered strawberries, and key lime pie to whoever’s on the other end of the phone as the dopey husband’s search intensifies. As it turns out – hoo daddy, what a swerve! – she’s talking about yogurt flavors which the husband would have realized if he could read the labels on the BIG FUCKING STACK OF YOGURT CONTAINERS right in front of his stupid face, but no, he misguidedly perseveres like a modern day Don Quixote in his quest for a mid-afternoon dessert treat.
The saddest moment in this emasculation theater of shame comes at the end when his wife hears him rattling around in the kitchen and asks, “Babe, what are you doing?” He doesn’t even get to respond and looks to the ground in shame like a scolded golden retriever. Have some sack, hombre! Just ask her point blank, “Do we have pie in this house and are you fucking hiding it from me, or are you talking about yogurt?” Or just go to the store, be a man, buy yourself a whole cake and eat it. How many times were you browbeaten until you reached this level of heartbreaking obedience? I have another question for this poor, poor, shell of a man – When was the last time you saw your wife naked? She changes into her pajamas in the bathroom, doesn’t she? You only get blown on your birthday. You haven’t seen your friends in months. And your favorite recent movie was “Made of Honor,” wasn’t it? Get out of your marriage while you still have some youth on your side, you sad bastard. Continue down this path, and you’ll likely end up so frustrated, your next TV appearance will be with Chris Hansen and a pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Bud Light – The Map: Drinkability Series
So here we have Bud Light, a beer I’ve claimed markets to idiots and assholes for years. Yeah, they’re often amusing, but when you sit down and actually think about what happens in these commercials, all you can deduce is that only someone with a room temperature IQ or the emotional development of a 5 year-old would act in the ways portrayed by people attempting to consume Bud Light. Two examples of this before we get to “Drinkability.”
1. A skydiving instructor attempts to coax a nervous jumper out of the plane by tossing a six-pack of Bud Light out the open door. The pilot sees this happen and races from the cockpit to jump after the falling beer without a parachute on his back. Instead of behaving like a rational adult and punching that asshole in the nuts back on the ground for wasting beer he could have drank, the pilot instead plummets to his death chasing after a $5 six-pack of shitty beer. Nice.
2. Two guys at a party grab the last beer from the cooler at the same time. To decide who gets the beer, they play rock/paper/scissors where one guy throws paper, and the other guy throws an actual rock at the guy’s head knocking him out. Supposedly these guys are friends, but if any of my friends threw a rock at my fucking face knocking me out over the last beer, not only would we not be friends, I might just up and murder him. Yet he just lies there while the party continues unabated and the rock-thrower probably goes off to try and fuck his girlfriend while the poor sap is out with a concussion.
Which brings us to “drinkability.” I seem to remember writing somewhere that drinkability is the lowest endorsement of consuming a liquid of all the words available in the English language. If you’re getting an enema, barium is drinkable, but just barely. Antifreeze and Drano are not drinkable. So, associating yourself with stuff that barely passes the “Will this kill me if I pour it down my throat?” test isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the quality of your beverage. And what’s so perplexing about the commercial linked above is that the asshole explaining drinkability even comments on this. I have a sneaking suspicion the statistics he mentions are not far off from the market research Anheuser-Busch conducted in preparation for this big, stupid campaign. So in every subsequent commercial, we need someone else to waste our time with an expositional monologue explaining how Bud Light has re-appropriated the term “drinkability.”
No one gives a shit about this term as it’s largely meaningless. Don’t believe me? Try it with something else. Hey Carl’s Jr., do your burgers have “eatability?” Ford Motor Company, do your cars have “driveability?” IKEA, how is the “sitability” of that davenport? All in all, these commercials are a fat waste of time, much like the act of drinking Bud Light itself. Do yourself a favor, switch to Coors Light, dubbed “The Most Refreshing Beer in the World” – a phrase that actually declares something, and thank me later.
I’ve saved the worst for last. And by worst, I mean the absolute mind-bending, brain-crushing, squirrel nut shittiest insane display of advertising ever conceived. If you haven’t seen this commercial yet, beware of clicking the link above because it goes to the full, skull-fucking 2 minute and 18 goddamn second version of this of this colossally miscalculated beacon of motive for the collective death of advertising executives everywhere.
In a nutshell, The Potty Dance is simply another entrant in the “How can we re-appropriate The Macarena again?” sweepstakes following in the illustrious footsteps of Pepto-Bismol’s absurd jingle ending with diarrhea. But instead of featuring a collection of regular folk doing a modified Macarena celebrating the imminent defilement of their underwear or a nearby toilet, this one has some fat, rapping clown who looks like either Biz Markie or Heavy D marshalling the proceedings while standing next to a random geriatric wearing jogging clothes on a stage that looks like it was leftover from Rainbow Randolph’s show in Death to Smoochy.
He goes step-by-step through the instructions for doing The Potty Dance on top of a beat that sounds like it was made on Playskool’s “My First Beatbox” murdering whatever credibility (likely nil from the get-go) he had with it. After a couple run-throughs, he does the standard early-90s, happy-go-lucky rap guy thing by gesturing toward the camera and going, “Yeah! You doin’ it!”
Then some fire fighters show up for no apparent reason, followed by a dorky Asian family, and then a whole cavalcade of buttfucking multiculturalism showing that The Potty Dance isn’t just an American phenomenon, our spray of retarded marketing bullshit knows no bound, be they geographical, cultural, or sensical. And the worst part is that even after all that (and that’s an absolute fuckload of things to happen already in a simple diaper commercial), it’s still only half over!
Now the whole world – firefighters, Indians, kangaroos – is doing The Potty Dance together and for some reason we’re supposed to all feel great about it. I feel desecrated.
First of all, the random collection of people wandering in and out of this video felt just plum insane like watching a Fellini film while on acid if the whole thing was underwritten by Huggies.
Secondly, how in Jesus’s blue tits is this supposed to sell diapers? I realize Pull Ups are to be used as that bridge between pissing yourself and joining collective toilet-using humanity while potty training, but seriously, what the fuck does this moronic dance accomplish? Do we really need universal choreography for toddlers to let us know they need to take a piss? I think that already exists, and putting this commercial out into the universe only makes God regret creating us at all and reach for that bottle of cheap rotgut he keeps in the second drawer of his desk when we create something like this that defies his very will.
Thirdly, there’s no way that’s a real black dude. It’s got to be Bruce Vilanch in blackface or something because no self-respecting black man would sacrifice his entire image for such a corporate-washed embarrassment and outright affront to rap music pandering to children who don’t need to be pandered to anymore than they already are.
And finally, this commercial proves there’s no good way to sell diapers. Selling a diaper inherently makes the audience think about bodily functions our culture doesn’t ever discuss. Diapers sell themselves – I mean really, what the fuck else are you going to use – so just pour the blue liquid into the bottom of it, show us how it doesn’t leak, and let’s move on please. Don’t foist this soul-crushing, trying-to-be-hip, pabulum on us because we’re at our collective breaking point. I’m begging you, Madison Avenue, fuck off and die before we all turn into the “Be Well” automatons from San Angeles in Demolition Man or D-Fens from Falling Down. Because we’re close to either collective brainwash or apocalyptic rebellion. Don’t push it.
In closing, I’m having a difficult time deciding which I’m more pissed off about – the fact that this commercial exists or that I watched it five shit-eating times so I could write about it for you all. While I hate the other commercials above with a fury, at least none of them has some Orwellian jingle that implants itself in your brain driving you slowly mad until you finally have to run out of your house and punch a stranger.
Maybe I can just pour some bleach into my eyes to erase my memory because mama makes the whites, white like the springtime because mama’s got the magic of Clorox 2!
Wait. Fuck!
21 Apr 2009 E Dagger
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