Funny, but…

Yeah, there were some funny commercials on the Super Bowl last night. The guy making babes and cash appear and cops dissapear by biting into Doritos… and then getting run over by a bus when he ran out of chips. Funny! The snow globe thrown at the boss’ crotch. Funny! The “punch small animals” ad. Funny-ish!

But funny isn’t everything, is it? It took a remark from my wife for me to notice that nearly all of the commercials thrived on violence, voyeurism and put-downs. Take the Troy Polamalu Coke commercial. It was a great idea to pay tribute to the Iconic Mean Joe Greene commercial of thirty years ago. But compare and contrast. The Mean Joe commercial was all about sharing and showing kindness. The kid sharse his Coke with a battered Mean Joe. And Mean Joe gives the kid the jersey off his back. Now what do we have? Polamalu rips the guy’s shirt off and gives it to the kid. Funny? For sure. But it has none of the charm and humanity of the classic ad. Instead of appealing to what’s best in us it appeals to our baser instincts. By next month it will be forgotten while the Mean Joe ad is still a classic 30 years later.

As Paul Carr put it about the web culture “what’s popular is meanness and so that’s almost all we [get] - page after page [or ad after ad] of cynicism, meanness, ranting and rage”

Where have you gone, Mean Joe? We need more of your brand of meanness.

Anthony Esolen says it better than I can at Mere Comments.