Humor

Faux humor is our foe.

I may not know much about humor, but I know when I laugh. And these days, that ain’t often. At least not when I’m watching commercials.

I’m afraid the never-ending, irresolvable debate about how effective humor is in advertising needs to be put on hold until we can garner a statistically meaningful sample of humorous ads. I mean truly funny ads. If it weren’t for the rare, genuinely funny tv spots that still crops up from time to time, ( i.e. “Stuart” for Ameritrade.com, the juggling chainsaws spot for Nike.whatever.com, the “monkey” spot for E*Trade, EDS’s “cat herding” spot, the grocery cart spot for Volkswagen, at which I laughed out loud, not to be confused with the unfunny Chevrolet grocery cart spot), I might forget and start thinking, like the rest of America, that the relentless barrage of faux funny beer, soft drink, dog food, cereal and snack spots are actually funny. They’re not.

Yes, they are shot, edited and scored as if they were humorous. And the way the copy is organized might lead you to believe that you were experiencing some funny stuff. Lines and/or visuals are delivered as if they were punchlines, and so forth. But all I find myself thinking is, “Okay, I’m familiar with this, here’s the place in the spot where something funny should happen . . . oh, I guess that was funny. All the signs point to it, why am I not laughing, have I lost my sense of humor?”

It’s curious to me that the only humorous advertising-related criticism I hear these days is from those who criticize dot com advertising for being funny, sometimes outrageously so, but with no point, relevant message or hint about what the website offers. I just assumed they were simply trying to get people curious enough to pay the site a visit and find out what it’s about. From what I understand, these sometimes kind of nuts commercials have yielded mixed results. All I know is, I’d much rather have to contend with aimless, blind, obscure but very funny commercials, than right on the money, strategically precise yawns.

The lameness and limpness of these funny-like spots has me downright depressed. Beer advertising in particular is a very potent depressant these days. Do you know anyone outside the ad agency which produced it, who finds the dumb wannabe jock who accuses the beautiful girl of looking down his shirt, funny? Or the witty repartee between Daisy Fuentes and whoever that other bimbo at the bar is?

We interrupt this column to bring you an Ad Fad Alert:

There’s a stupid tagline trend out there, and the sooner it’s exposed, the sooner we can snuff it out. This new trend is one word taglines. For instance,

United Airlines. Rising.
Motorola. Wings.
Dodge. Different.
Honda. Thinking.
Nissan. Driven.
HP. Invent.
Hertz. Exactly.
EDS. Solved.
Concur. Forward.

Let us band together and eradicate this advirus before it becomes an epidemic.

Oops. Too late.

And now back to our regularly scheduled column.

Not to beat a dead Clydesdale, but the next time you watch a beer commercial, notice whether you laugh, or even smile at it. If you do, take a moment to reflect. Is it because the spot is actually funny, or because you’ve been given all the right cues, (casting, pacing, music etc. -- cues you are intimately familiar with from watching a lifetime of sitcoms), that it’s a funny commercial, and so you produce a pre-programmed Pavlovian smile or chuckle when the punchline is delivered?

I suspect the problem is that those who grew up during the golden age of bad sitcoms, watching The Brady Bunch/Partridge Family and their rightful heirs, Who’s The Boss, Family Affair, Full House, and right up to Jesse, Two guys and a Girl, Will & Grace, etc., are now populating ad agencies, where they are adeptly squeezing out that same derivative drivel in 30 second extrusions, which of course is being bought and paid for by clients of the same upbringing.

Lest I be accused of doling out purely destructive criticism, I do have one suggestion for all you writers and art directors out there. I think this simple fix may solve the problem. Simply take another lesson from the legions of sucky sitcoms. When designing your next humorous spot, insert, at the appropriate moments during your next commercial, a laugh track. This device has propped up many a torpid 30 minute show through the years. Why not our 30 second shows as well?