Gene Weingarten and I think alike

This weekend, after seeing the Super Bowl commercial for ??? where the one guy is so serious about backyard football that he takes down a girl (a pretty rough tackle) - I mentioned to DH that it would have been much funnier if they had left off the last two seconds that show her tackling him back. DH duley noted that the feminists would have been up in arms if violence against women had been the punchline of the commercial; and while I agreed that that was probably the case - I still thought that it ruined the humor moment of the commercial.

I'd forgotten all about it until reading this little blurb in Gene Weingarten's weekly chat:

Sunnyvale, Calif.: Gene-

I want to point out a fatal flaw during one of the most touted Super Bowl commercials that I believe people are overlooking. You're the only person I "know" who could potentially appreciate my point.

The Careerbuilder.com commercial with the monkeys was terrible and I'll explain why: The joke was basically ruined by the monkey adjusting the chart. At that point the punchline became the fact that the monkeys don't care if profits are down, they are going to pretend they're up in order to have an excuse to party. To me that's pretty lame. If the chart had been left as is, the joke would have been that the monkeys are smart enough to wear clothes and read a chart, but too stupid to read it correctly. This is a classic absurdist joke about the limited intelligence of animals. Kind of like the old Toonces the Driving Cat sketch on Saturday Night Live where the cat can drive but he's terrible at it. That's funny stuff. I saw the commercial as a wasted opportunity.

Gene Weingarten: I completely agree, and had the same thought when I saw it. There was another ad that did the same thing. The one where a guy is such a backyard - football fanatic that he slams a woman into the ground and taunts her as she is lying there, inert. Startlingly funny. Then they ruined it by having her reappear at the end, taking HIM down. This ad was about men being jerks. The second part -- politically correct -- ruined it.


I totally agreed! Independently too. The commercials this year were almost all uniformly ruined by trying to take the joke just one step too far. Like the one with the bear, the beer, and the two guys - where one guy swipes the beer peace offering, leaving the other to be attacked. It totally should have just ended with the guy running off with the beer and a menacing stare by the bear - not the spoon-feed-me ending that it did have.