SITES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
Sweaty Dudes [aka Sports]
Metsblog
Deadspin
Kissing Suzy Kolber
Fire Joe Morgan
Yard Work
No Mas
The Funny
My Blog Could Be Your Life
Patton Oswalt
A Special Thing
MST3K
Name of the Year
Hot Chicks with Douchebags
Subbaculcha
Bookslut
WFMU's Beware of the Blog
Flick Lives
Parental Guidance
Die Die Die: DID YOU SEE THAT?!
I don't understand people who watch the Super Bowl strictly for the commercials. That's like going to Peter Luger's for the parsley. Sure, nine times out of ten, The Big Game winds up being a glorified coronation for the predetermined champ, and a boring one at that. Classic games like the one played on Sunday are few and far between, which I guess is as it should be (if classic games happened all the time, they wouldn't be classic).
But nowadays, I don't think the commercials are a good reason to tune in. The sheer boatload of money needed to purchase ad time means that no company can afford to be daring, experimental, or just plain weird. What you get are ads full of the lowest common denominator mathematically possible: celebrities whose mere appearance is supposed to be a joke, songs you've heard a million times, people getting hit in the crotch or farted on, and lots of other stuff that makes you ashamed to be human.
Ads on this level must function like cafeteria food: palatable to all, offensive to none. That's why I was astounded by a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl for Salesgenie.com. It showed a pair of animated pandas talking about bolstering their bamboo business, in the worst "ah-so" accents this side of The Phantom Menace .
I'm sure there are people out there who think the ad is innocent, that any objection to it must come from overly sensitive PC types. There isn't anything overtly racist in the commercial, at least not at first blush. But it's supposed to be funny. And if you watch it, as you can at Awful Announcing, it's obvious that the makers of this ad believed viewers would derive a large portion of its Humor Quotient from the pandas' hilarious accents.
Was this ad created in 1961 by some Nostradamus of Madison Avenue, and just recovered from a time capsule? In what universe is it still acceptable to do this for yuks? I guess Team America gives Kim-Il Sung a pretty awful Asian accent, but even in that movie, his accent wasn't the sole source of humor. Plus, I'm not going to waste too much energy lamenting an unfavorable depiction of a paranoid, homicidal dictator.
Like a lot of budding smartasses, I loved Mad Magazine when I was a kid. Occasionally, I'd get one of the Mad books or Super Specials, which were reprints of older issues. Occasionally, I'd have to ask my parents to explain the objects of Mad's scorn from years past. ("Wow, they're really sticking it that Spiro Agnew guy!")
But Mad also had some shameful features in its formative years, in which such things as women drivers and buck-toothed Japanese soldiers were considered hilarious. I had to ask my parents about these things, too, because I honestly didn't understand them (especially since my mother was a better driver than my father by an astronomical margin). They'd just shrug and say, It's a stupid old stereotype, it's not funny anymore.
The folks at Salesgenie.com obviously did not receive such parental guidance.
It's fitting that this horrible commercial should air during Super Bowl XLII, because its existence is almost as unlikely as the Giants' upset of the undefeated Patriots. First of all, a creative ad agency employee had to come up with the idea in the first place. This is no small feat, because we're talking about someone who has probably received a good education, graduated from college, and met actual Asian people during the course of his/her life.
Then, this ad had to get the greenlight to be pitched to Salesgenie.com by said creative person's superiors at the ad agency. Keep in mind that these superiors are in charge of multimillion dollar accounts, people who hold the fate of their agency and hundreds of employees in their hands. People who generally try to avoid pitching horribly offensive material to their clients.
Then, the folks at Salesgenie.com had to pick this ad out of all the pitches they received. And they had to choose it not just for a nationwide campaign, but they had to decide that this is what they would air during the Super Bowl, in a thirty-second spot that will cost their company $2.7 million.
After all of these hurdles had been cleared, the commercial had to be produced by talented animators and voice over artists. And somehow, all of these people had to go ahead with the ad agency's vision and not quit in disgust over its content.
Finally, the ad had to be cleared by the Fox Network, the NFL, and the FCC. None of these entities are known for having a devil-may-care attitude. Each of them has a vested interest in making sure that nobody is offended by anything shown during the biggest sporting event in America.
Despite all of the roadblocks thrown in its way, defying all odds, common sense, and better judgment, blissfully ignorant of the march of time and the advance of an entire ethnic group, this commercial somehow made it to the air.
That's not quite as impressive as the Giants' road to the Super Bowl, or Eli Manning's ridiculous scramble from a sure sack and David Tyree's even more ridiculous catch that followed. But somehow the Salesgenie.com ad made it on the air, while an apparently naughty spot by GoDaddy didn't.
I guess Salesgenie.com just wanted it more. And by "it," I mean "to get everyone in their marketing department fired." Kudos!
UPDATE: After I wrote the above and ranted about it to The Wife, she told me that the stated aim of the marketing company hired by Salesgenie was to make the game's worst ad. After confirming this on the Interwebs, I now hate them, this commercial, and everyone associated a million times more than I did before.
If you wanted to make a shitty ad, there are so many routes you could take. You could make a fake-foreign-looking ad, like the wretched Mentos ads of yesteryear. You could come up with a powerfully unappealing spokes-thing, like the Quiznos sponge monkeys. You could have given cameras to kindergarteners and let their unfocused, scatalogical minds run wild.
Faced with a million choices, this marketing company went for racism, their laziest and most manipulative option. It was obviously their aim to label anyone who took offense at their ad as uptight. Hey, you can't take a joke? Relax, it's just animated pandas!
Does it matter that the person who wrote this ad is named Vin Gupta, and presumably Asian himself? I guess that gives him a convenient cover. I also bet Vin didn't give any consideration to commercials that featured money-grubbing Jews, or watermelon-chomping blacks. Because those images are so blatantly beyond the pale of what the viewing public will accept.
But he knew that certain groups--in this case, Chinese and Indian immigrants--are still kind of okay to make fun of. Throw in a fat lady, a bald dude, and some flamboyantly flaming gay guy, and you've got a quintet of Acceptable Objects of Hate.
I think you can joke about nearly anything, including stereotypes and racism. But the mere depiction of racist stereotypes isn't a joke, any more than copying The Great Gatsby makes you a novelist.
Mean spiritedness alone is not funny. Like if I were to say, "Vin Gupta should get hit by a tractor trailer full of leukemia," that's not funny in and of itself. All humor has to have context and perspective. You would have to know who I am, who Vin Gupta is, why a tractor trailer, how a tractor trailer could possibly be filled with leukemia, and why I want him to get hit with such a hypothetical vehicle.
But yeah, Vin Gupta should get hit by a tractor trailer full of leukemia.
Posted 02.05.08 08:00am * Permalink
Copyright 2004-08 Scratchbomb Inc. Trespassers punished by catapault