The Douchebag Bible (26 page)

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.