Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Commercials’

Just when you started to believe the excuses for the Australian KFC “crowd pleaser” commercial (e.g., that “not one person [polled] in Australia had any idea of the American stereotype of black people and chicken”), I uncovered another Australian gem–from back in the day (1992):

Now, admittedly, I’ve never eaten at Chicken Treat, but it’s probably a safe bet that, at $2.75, their “Chick’n Ham’n Cheese Burger” is no better than, say, Wendy’s Bacon Swiss Crispy. (Though Wendy’s wins on style points, for placing their adjective at the end.) In other words, Chicken Treat isn’t putting out an exceptionally delicious sandwich that’s universally known as the best. It’s just a regular-ass, fast-food, factory-farm chicken sandwich. So the fact that the black guy can’t contain himself around it—hungrily licking his chops while visually fixating on it at the beginning—says more about the guy than the sandwich.

Wendy's Bacon Swiss Crispy

Then there’s contrast between the two characters, which couldn’t be more stark. On the one hand is the cool, collected White guy with his deep voice (and exceptionally bushy, expressive eyebrows). He’s a wearing a conservative button-down shirt, buttoned to the very top, and a deliciously Fantastic Sams hairdo, circa 1988. On the other hand is the out-of-control, screaming black dude carrying on about the sandwich in his shrill voice. He’s got on the loudest—and frankly, nicest—floral shirt I’ve seen in years, as well as a flattened-bill baseball cap rested on the rear three-quarter on his head. I swear, the only thing missing is the original tags hanging off of his hat and a spinning basketball on his finger. Oh, wait, he’s probably busy licking those fingers.

So, Australians, I call bullshit.

If you’re up late enough watching TV, you start getting the extended commercials for things that tend to appeal to up-late slobs (e.g., Girls Gone Wild tapes, no-work exercise machines, seductive get-rich-quick schemes).

Lately, I’ve been seeing this gem from our friends at eDiets a lot (watch as much as you can tolerate):

Apart from being entirely too long, repetitive, and giving you a nagging case of that embarrassed-even-though-it’s-not-you feeling, this commercial is another sign that the end-of-days is hurtling toward us.

Five Disturbing Things about This Commercial

1. We’re such collective fat-asses these days that you can actually take out two-minute ads on TV for unnecessary “diet plans” and still turn a nice profit.

2. People know so little about basic nutrition that having someone else prepare every single one of your meals and ship it to your door “fresh” is considered a viable option for eating healthy. What’s next: eShits.com, a service where someone else takes your shits for you? You heard it here first.

3. Insultingly out-dated “rap music,” with whack-ass rhymes and tired “hip-hop” phrases (“I got it going on”) and gestures (raise the roof). The only thing missing is a line of kids doing the Running Man in the background.

4. Lamely, and transparently, trying to legitimize the use of a “rap song” by prominently featuring a black girl—who, from her before-and-after pictures, doesn’t even appear to have lost very much weight.

5. Setting back White girls everywhere—who have been working tirelessly to erode the pesky stereotype they can’t dance—by putting on some of the worst White-lady dancers imaginable.

There’s a fine line between using race semi-constructively to understand the world, and bona-fide racism. I know this because Ethnic Avenue dead-ends right before that line—Racist Parkway. On the other hand, the Australians seem to have no problem taking a bloomin’ kangaroo leap over that line, as evidenced by a recent KFC commercial creating quite a stir around the Internets.

I have to admit there’s something remotely amusing and, at first glance, harmless about pacifying a group of rowdy black people with an enormous bucket of chicken—the so-called “KFC crowd pleaser” (though we all know they wanted to call it the “black-people silencer”). But the more I watch the commercial, the more I realize the racism is in the details: the Aussie rubbing his face in exasperation; the black people (reportedly from the West Indies) dancing around happily and inconsiderately; the loaded “awkward situation” euphemism.

An interesting variation on this theme comes courtesy of our foot-shuffling, pen-flicking Korean friends.

We all know there are different types of racism. There’s rednecks-dragging-you-from-a-pick-up-truck racism. There’s abruptly-lock-your-automatic-car-doors racism. There’s your-membership-application-has-mysteriously-been-rejected racism. And there’s everything below that. So as these things go, resurrecting an old, tired stereotype is relatively low on the racist (and, frankly, originality) scale. After all, black people do seem to have a special relationship with chicken because, as Dave Chappelle famously put it, “it’s fuckin’ delicious.”

The temptation, of course, is to compare these commercials and declare one of them the more racist of the two. The Korean version certainly has some nice touches that favor it to win that contest: an attempted Korean barbecue abduction, cannibalistic savages hungrily devouring fried chicken, a theatrical protagonist performing Eastern magic. But the Australian one benefits from the automatically more condescending accent, and an overall douchier ass-wipe delivering the lines. So it’s definitely a toss-up.

What do you think?

I’m pretty sure everyone has seen that commercial where a couple of white girls are complaining to an unsuspecting black girl about how much work it is to take their birth control pill everyday.

Unlike most people, who tune out during commercials, I generally pay pretty close attention to them. That’s because some of the most fucked up hilarious things about our society are embedded right in our advertising. I do my best to decode them.

I know what you’re thinking: how can you diagnose anything from just another dumb-ass, misleading pharmaceutical commercial? Because, remarkably, this particular dumb-ass pharmaceutical commercial manages to accurately depict several social ills, in a matter of seconds.

Three Actual Problems Depicted in the NuvaRing Commercial

1. Abundance of Brain-Dead Chicks: In the first few seconds of the commercial, the short-haired, Minnie Driver-looking girl is mindlessly humming along to the television (to the tune of another Nuvaring commercial). After that, she manages to remain puzzled throughout. Regrettably, she’s of the now-abundant type that can, and often does, conduct entire conversations–even in-person ones–in emoticons and cutesy internet abbreviations. It’s no coincidence that’s she’s holding her QWERTY cell phone open the whole time. But, of the three, she’s the most harmless.

2. Manipulative, Bitchy Know-It-Alls: The longer-hair ringleader is the type of girl that you (as a man or woman) want to stay away from at all costs. First of all, she’s stupid enough to buy into cheap commercial gimmicks. But despite this, she still thinks she’s smarter than the rest of the group–as evidenced by her rolling eyes and condescending tone with the black chick. Worst of all, this bitch isn’t content with drinking the Kool-Aid herself.  You have to take a few sips too.

3. Lazy, Instant-Gratification Seekers: You have to hand it to the assholes at the pharmaceutical company for astutely recognizing that people are getting so dumb and lazy that they’d prefer to cram something into their body cavity—and hold it there for several weeks—over taking a tiny pill everyday. All three women are guilty of this, though the black girl is naïve enough to let bitchy-know-it-all seduce her into trying it.

In the end, it’s a good thing they’re all wearing NuvaRings. We don’t want these idiots reproducing.

I’ve hated UPS for most of my adult life.

Anyone that’s ever lived in an apartment, has had any kind of job that requires they leave the house, or lived in an even remotely ghetto neighborhood, pretty much hates them for the same reasons I do. It’s hard to get your stuff.

The bottom line is this: unless you’re in a mirrored-glass building downtown or in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, UPS doesn’t give a shit about your poor-ass, apartment-dwelling ethnic package. And, unless you’ve rearranged your schedule to get it delivered on the second or third attempt, you’ve had to—on more than one occasion—drive (or take the bus) to the UPS warehouse, on some industrial street you wouldn’t otherwise know existed, to pick up your own damn package.

Frankly, it makes sense UPS doesn’t like ethnic and poor people. If I were them, I wouldn’t like us either. UPS charges three times as much scratch for something the regular-ass post office has been doing for 200 years. There’s a post office in every neighborhood and a mailbox on every street corner. And, the post office (still) delivers on the weekend. Ethnic people are born with the instinct to see through this kind of bullshit, and would never in a million years use UPS given the choice (working there is another story).

Ethnic bargain hunters may not be good business for UPS, but the rich, the corporate, and the exceptionally white are. Those guys roll up into a ball just thinking about the post office, because it’s pretty much exclusively manned by rude, slow-moving ethnic people. (In Los Angeles, mostly impatient black ladies that don’t want to hear your shit.) The post office is inexpensive, and a lot of these types subscribe religiously to the sometimes-very-true notion that “low cost equals low value.” The post office is also the most general-admission place in town. John Q. Homeless can, and often does, stand in line right alongside you.

So imagine the surprised look on my face when I saw the latest series of UPS commercials, featuring an ambiguously ethnic, corporate-looking douchebag drawing pictures on a dry erase board (with a deliciously, and probably unintentionally, ironic choice for background music, a song by The Postal Service band). The craziest part about these commercials is that this douchebag isn’t delivering the packages, he’s the fuckin’ spokesman.

UPS's ambiguously ethnic douchebag spokesman.

I guess that after years of not giving a shit about ethnic people, UPS is finally realizing that brown can do more for them than they can for it.

You have to hand it to Magic Johnson, after years of performing magic on the basketball court, he’s now performing his magic act in the pockets of unsuspecting ethnic people.

The metamorphosis from Magic Johnson, the jolly basketball player to Magic Johnson, the jolly street thug was a gradual process—so gradual, in fact, that most people probably haven’t noticed how sleazy he’s become.

Magic’s career as “business man” started like everybody else’s—with an eponymous chain of movie theatres. Before you knew it, he owned a few commercial buildings. Then, he got into the strange business of selling you your daily cup of undrinkably strong coffee (Starbucks) and your weekend order of “loaded” potato skins (TGI Fridays).

But, these days, Magic Johnson will sell you just about anything. His commercials are getting so outrageous, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s figured out how to pick your pocket through the screen when you turn your back to the television.

Here’s a sampling of Magic’s latest “inventory”:

San Manuel Casino

An unusually raspy Magic pitches the long odds and third-shelf entertainment of Southern California Indian casinos.

Jackson Hewitt Tax Services

Claiming that it’s “money like magic,” he pushes the loan-shark-like terms of the Money Now Loan—an unfavorable Tax Refund Anticipation Loan scheme for the most desperate.

Rent-a-Center

The most thuggish of Magic’s hustles, Rent-a-Center will lease you an old TV for three times its original price and send someone to threaten you at your house if you miss a payment. Despite how bad that sounds, I think most of us can agree: it would totally be worth it if Magic showed up at your door, and personally beat you down in his NBA uniform.

See Magic’s Rent-a-Center Commercials