And Now A Word from Our Sponsor

An essay about TV commercials...

If you like sports as much as I do (and right now the Summer Olympics are on) you wind up watching a lot of TV which means you also wind up watching a lot of TV commercials.

Watch enough commercials and you begin to pick up patterns and today we’re going to examine that topic, not because we can do anything about it or change anything, but because I want you just as irritated as I am which might seem kind of petty and self-centered, but Donald Trump has based a presidential campaign on that impulse and millions of people are going to vote for him, so quit whining and let’s get on with it.

Drug Ads

For a long long time drug companies promoted their prescription products to doctors because doctors were the ones who could prescribe them to patients, but in 1983 a drug company decided to go around doctors and straight to consumers with TV ads which they hoped would result in consumers asking their doctors to prescribe the miracle drugs they saw advertised between episodes of The A-Team and Magnum, P.I.

Because who better to decide what prescription drugs we take than us poorly-informed consumers without medical degrees and only vague ideas of what malady we’re suffering from?

I always enjoy the list of things that can go wrong if you take the suggested drug and they want to gloss over those possible side effects so they say them really fast or run them on the bottom of the screen in type too small to be read unless you’re watching TV with the aid of an electron microscope and pretty much without exception the list of possible side effects sounds worse than the original problem.

For instance…

You can take a drug to combat psoriasis (which I won’t name because I can’t afford the lawsuits), but according to the following article, the side effects might include:

Skin rash, itching, hives, swelling of the face, lips, tongue or throat, fever, chills, cough, sore throat, wounds that won’t heal, trouble passing urine, general feeling of discomfort or being unwell, liver injury, dark yellow or brown urine, general ill feeling of discomfort or flu-like symptoms, loss of appetite, right upper belly pain, feeling unusually weak or tired, yellowing of the eyes or skin, low red blood cell counts, trouble breathing, feeling faint, lightheaded, falling, skin redness, swelling, warmth or pain, back pain, fatigue, headache, joint pain and stomach pain.

And after all that, the website warns this list might not include all the possible side effects and if you get any new and interesting ones you might want to call your doctor or a Hollywood agent because it sounds like some of the symptoms Jeff Goldblum suffered in The Fly.  

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21231-risankizumab-injection

The Overly-Enthusiastic Consumer

Many commercials feature someone who used a product and now can’t shut up about how wonderful it is and go on to ruin birthday parties, picnics and office meetings by yammering on and on about a laxative, insurance company or prescription drug they’re currently high on and, in extreme cases, break into song and dance and right now I’m thinking about a drug for Type 2 diabetes.

I sometimes feel sorry and/or embarrassed for the people involved in these commercials, because someone had to write that song and choreograph that dance and the actors probably took acting and dance lessons and all those poor jerks did those things because they wanted to be in “show business.”

But wound up dancing their hearts out to promote a drug whose side effects include “necrotizing fasciitis” which sounds like fascists who want to bang dead people, but is actually a bacterial infection that can cause tissue damage in the perineum and that sounds like a place the Romans watched Christians fight lions, but is actually the area between your anus and genitals and (continuing a theme I seem to be developing) that sounds like the neighborhood between the glamorous Las Vegas Strip and the depressing suburbs that surround it.

The Gang At Work

Another category of irritating commercials are the ones featuring a gang of people who have minimum wage jobs and work in depressing shitholes, but still enjoy each other’s company and like to hang out and maybe go on vacation together and right now I’m thinking of the gang of co-workers who sell insurance at beaches and campgrounds and the tight-knit group of pals employed at a fast-food restaurant.

True story:

My son was visiting from LA and I asked him where he wanted to eat lunch and he named the fast food restaurant with the happy co-workers because they didn’t have one of those near where he lived, so we go there and order food in the drive-thru and then pull up to window to pick up our cheeseburgers.

Which didn’t happen.

And didn’t happen.

And didn’t happen.

After an extremely long wait a guy showed up at the window and said our order was delayed because the guy who took it had quit his job and walked out.

No idea what last-straw incident took place between taking our order and giving us our burgers, but I’m still waiting for the fast-food restaurant commercial where one of the gang fires his crappy visor across the counter and yells, “Fuck this place!” before tipping over the soft drink dispenser and kicking a door open as he leaves the premises, but before he does all that I really hope he hands me my sack of cheeseburgers.

Geeky Guys/Hot Girls

I can’t help but notice how many commercials show male dorks with smoking hot female companions and I think the not-so-subtle subliminal message is:

“If you use our product, look who you’ll wind up with.”

But the smoking hot females must have the IQ of a door knob because one sniff of some cheap body spray and they’re wrapping themselves around guys who look like the before picture in a Charles Atlas ad.

And for those of you not born during the later years of the Civil War:

Charles Atlas ads ran in comic books and were multi-panel stories where some skinny geek went to the beach with his hot girlfriend and a bully kicks sand in their faces so naturally the girlfriend dumps the geek and runs off with the bully, but then the geek takes the Charles Atlas course of body building and about two days later looks like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and goes back to the beach and kicks the bully’s ass.

His extremely fickle ex-girlfriend now wants to bang him and says, “Oh, Mac, you’re a real man after all.”

The obvious lesson here is get a better girlfriend because this back-stabbing skank would run off with Jeffrey Dahmer if he kicked sand in your face…and then ate it.

And now let’s venture out on some politically-incorrect thin ice.

The Mixed-Race Family

To prove how “woke” they are, pretty much every TV commercial family now has to be interracial which I’ve got absolutely nothing against because I agree with whatever comedian said we could solve a lot of our problems if we just keep having sex with each other until we’re all the same color.

But these interracial families show up in TV commercials way more often than they do in Real Life and in one insurance ad the mom is White and the dad is Black (or maybe it was the other way around…I forgot to take notes) and they have three kids and one looks kinda White and one looks kinda Black and the third kid looks kinda Asian.

As Moses said when he found it he wasn’t going to be allowed to enter the Promised Land after leading the Israelites around the desert for 40 years:

WTF?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, married couples that are interracial or interethnic went from 7.4 percent to 10.2 percent between the year 2000 and 2016, an increase I fully endorse.

But the U.S. Census Bureau isn’t counting married couples that appear in TV ads because it’s way more than 10.2 percent and while I’m a Liberal to the point of thinking Bernie Sanders is too Conservative, on some issues the desire to be politically correct has gotten fucking goofy.

Anyway…

I wrote all that a while back, but didn’t post it because I was afraid it might sound kinda racist and anytime you ask yourself if something sounds kinda racist, it probably is, but then decided to post this after I heard Chris Rock complain about the same thing: they don’t show Black families in commercials anymore, all the families have to be interracial to demonstrate the “wokeness” of their sponsors.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/interracial-marriages.html

And now that I’ve expressed what sounds like a Conservative opinion about political correctness, I’ll go right back to being a Socialist.

Toilet Paper and Laxative Ads

At some point the people behind Seinfeld realized they could talk about pretty much any topic as long as they used a euphemism, so a screwable guy became “sponge-worthy” and anyone with enough self-control to not masturbate became “master of my domain” and a penis shriveled by cold water became “shrinkage.”

So far so good.

But two years after Seinfeld went off the air, a toilet paper company introduced some bears who used their product and before long we were treated to commercials about bits of toilet paper stuck to a bear’s hairy ass and encouraged to enjoy defecating and make me long for some commercials featuring “low-talking” bears so I don’t know what the hell they’re saying.

If you want to read a really long and scholarly article about the euphemisms used in TV commercials for laxatives (trust me you don’t, because I already read parts of it and that was more than enough) here you go:

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/pr-2018-0047/html?lang=en

Today’s Lesson

You should probably start a blog because when anything bad or irritating happens the consolation prize is having new material to write about. I’ve literally been in the middle of a bad experience and thought:

“This will make a good story.”

I’m pretty sure it’s the same process used by Ernest Hemingway to come up with his light-hearted tales about adulterous wives “accidentally” shooting their husbands, matadors getting gored and old men losing their prize catch to a bunch of sharks which might have been inspired by Ernest’s experience with book publishers.

Now go enjoy the Summer Olympics (if you make it to 3AM you can watch the mixed-air pistols final) and the irritating commercials that interrupt them.