You’d think by now that I’d be used to TV commercials in which mothers and daughters walk along the beach discussing “you know, that not-so-fresh feeling.”
When these commercials air, I have that “you know, not-so-able-to-keep-down-my-breakfast feeling.”
The only good news, lately, is that now men get to be humiliated in thirty seconds, too.
Remember the laxative commercial with the high school coach? He’s worried sick that if he doesn’t get enough fiber, he’ll be so constipated he won’t be able to concentrate on the state basketball playoffs.
I haven’t coached a lot of teams—okay, any teams—but I can’t believe I’d be whining in the locker room about how “some fiber laxatives taste chalky and unpleasant” when I should be in there kicking some sixteen-year-old butt.
Well, thank goodness for improved Metamucil. Coach downs a glass of something that looks like sawdust and Coke, smacks his lips, and, next scene, he’s watching his team win the game at the buzzer.
What are they really saying here? That if you take your laxatives your team can win The Big Game?
Imagine the press conference after the big win.
Reporter: “Coach, I saw you looked a little tense back in the quarter-finals but you were so doggone relaxed today. What’s your secret?”
Coach: “Well, we just got a great group of guys and I’m just so proud of ’em. And we owe a lot to the Almighty, of course. And, well, since I’ve gotten rid of my constipation, I feel as happy as a pig in poop. So to speak.”
Even more embarrassing is the ad for a diarrhea remedy. (Pay attention, Coach, you never know when the tide will turn.) An architect has a pinched look when wifey drops him at the office.
Small wonder. He has to spend the day on top of a skyscraper under construction and he’s got diarrhea.
Can you imagine anything more horrible? Hubby blurts his fears to his wife. She nods knowingly and tosses him a box of Immodium AD. (What does the AD stand for, anyway? Agonizing Doofus?)
The happy ending is when she saves her husband from looking like a weenie in front of all those construction workers. (“For the last time, pal, there ain’t no elevator up here.”)
Even laundry detergent commercials are offensive. In a commercial for Surf detergent, we meet a woman who has just finished doing a mountain of laundry. Hubby comes in and asks, “Hey! How do you know that laundry is REALLY clean?”
She’s just spent a couple of hours washing and bleaching and drying and folding and Oliver Stone here asks a dumb question like that?
Instead of taking his clothes out to the driveway and running his truck tires over it a few times (“Gosh, honey, guess you’re right. This stuff doesn’t look all that clean to me, either”), she patiently accepts it when he convinces her to iron part of the wash to “bring out the odors that lurk within.”
I must’ve missed her lobotomy scar because she starts ironing up a storm and squealing, “He’s right. There are all these icky odors!”
The lesson here is obvious: never iron anything. There’s nothing more embarrassing, after all, than laundry that has that, well, not-so-fresh feeling.