Read The Douchebag Bible Online
Authors: TJ Kirk
Commercials For Mediocrity
Television has taught me much about my enemy, the human race.
It has shown me, with stark clarity, their every perverse desire
and oppressive insecurity. It has lain naked before me their
cruelty and ignorance. One drunken night, I sat before this idiot
box—what Harlan Ellison in his infinite insight into all things
dubbed “the glass teat”—with a pen in hand and a notebook
sprawled out on the coffee table before me, jotting down the
messages of television advertisements in the most undiluted
terms I could manage. Here is a sampling of the results:
1. Save money on car insurance with
Progressive
, so that you
can waste it on frivolous purchases that your wife doesn't know
about.
2. If you play the game "
Rock Band
" for the
Nintendo Wii
, you
will become as cool as the members of an actual band.
3. Anything that you do after midnight, other than going to
Denny's
, will turn out badly.
4.
Red Bull Energy Drink
will enable you to fly to Heaven for
the purpose of exacting revenge on your recently deceased
husband for leaving his fortune to his mistress rather than you
and the two children you had with him.
5. Attractive people are all inexplicably using dating services,
so your ugly ass had better get in on that action.
6. Penis Enlargement Pill (
Extenz
) is "scientifically proven"
and if it didn't work then its makers could not possible afford
to put commercials for it on television.
7. Without a drug called
ProGene
, you will be a completely
unsatisfactory lover. Graphs are presented to prove this fact.
8. With
AutoZone
, you can restore a shitty old car that you
found on the side of the road to working condition if you work
on it constantly for months on end.
Let’s examine these concepts one-by-one and extrapolate their
appeal, shall we? We shall.
1. Save money on car insurance with
Progressive
, so that you
can waste it on frivolous purchases that your wife doesn't
know about.
Saving money is obviously desirable, but not good enough to
really sell insurance in
Progressive’s
opinion. You also have to
spell out for people what they could do with this money and, in
this instance, they’re saying, “Hey guy’s, with all the money you’ll
save you could buy shit behind your wife’s back! She’ll never find
out!”
Only a fool would look to commercials for their morality
and obviously no one looks at this material as though it were
meant to influence or persuade us—but it is and it does!
If commercials didn’t persuade us to buy products, then
multi-billion-dollar corporations would not waste money
utilizing them to sell everything from car insurance to low-fat
yogurt. Why then is it a stretch to think that this message of, “It’s
okay—or at least expected—to go behind your wife’s back with the
household’s finances” might be influential?
2. If you play the game "
Rock Band
" for the
Nintendo Wii
, you
will become as cool as the members of an actual band.
The oldest lie in the advertiser’s arsenal: X will make you cool.
You must have X. Without X your life will be reduced to a hideous
montage of shame and degradation.
What most uncool people never seem to realize, even
under the crushing weight of all those unfulfilled promises of
thousands upon thousands of products designed to make you cool,
is that cool simply isn’t sold in a store. A loser in a corvette parked
outside his palatial estate is still a loser. If this inescapable truth
was ever realized, the entire advertising industry would be
destroyed overnight.
And
that
would be fucking cool.
3. Anything that you do after midnight, other than going to
Denny's
, will turn out badly.
This is a strange phenomena of recent advertising: the non
sequitur masquerading as conventional wisdom. You haven’t
always known that everything you do after midnight is doomed to
fail? Well, you’ve always known it now.
As soon as Denny’s creates this conventional wisdom, they
immediately defy it! How bold! “Marvel at how we stand in
defiance of the principle that we ourselves contrived for the
specific purpose of boldly defying it!”
4.
Red Bull Energy Drink
will enable you to fly to Heaven for
the purpose of exacting revenge on your recently deceased
husband for leaving his fortune to his mistress rather than you
and the two children you had with him.
I like commercials that make claims that are so ridiculous that
they are designed to not be believed. Energy drinks in particular
enjoy this technique. A man drinks a
Vault
and he suddenly has
the ability to punch out sharks while clubbing lesser men to death
with his erect penis.
Why is this commercial making the claim that the product
it advertises can do things that even the dumbest viewer knows
with a binding certainty it cannot do? I think it’s to distract us
from the fact that the product doesn’t actually do anything.