Like the Edwin Hawkins Singers said, Oh Happy Day - I finally have a new computer (well, they didn't say the new computer part). Anyway, it's about fucking time, and I am thrilled about it, though I am still working on getting all my stuff set up the way I like it and attempting to figure out Vista.

How else to make the first post on a new computer, than about commercials.

Just like there's a special place in the universe for things they shouldn't be funny, but are, there's a special place for things that should be funny but just aren't.



I like Conan O'Brien. He's a funny guy. I like H. Jon Benjamin (his agent). He voices McGurk, the best character in Home Movies, and is generally a pretty funny guy. I saw them and I wanted it to be funny, I wanted to laugh. It's meta, which of course could be good or bad; Conan doing a commercial about doing a Bud Light commercial in Sweden.

I wish I could just say it's not funny because it's a bud light commercial, but that would be too easy. Worse products (I know, there aren't many) have had better commercials before (for example, I do not like Subway, but am mesmorized by the original five dollar foot long commercials (the ones with Godzilla and the Japanese news reporter and such, not the new garbage ones with people dancing in a subway store)).

Someone I talked to suggested it's possible that it's not funny because Conan is so self-depricating, and doesn't take himself seriously - maybe that it would work better if Conan was replaced by someone whose image makes you think they were be more outraged by the in-commercial commercial being aired in America. While that's a possibility, I don't think that's it. Another thought is that the foreign commercial idea is just outdated - the audience for this commercial is familiar with weird foreign commercials - and Conan's commercial is not suffieicently ridiculous based on what we've already seen to be funny.

While these may play a role, I don't think any of these explanations really cover it all. The creators of the commercial have simply accomplished the moderately difficult - making funny people, and an inherently funny situation not funny, just weird. It's almost like it's an ad made by a firm attempting to act like someone trying to start a youtube phenonemon but not really understanding how it works, or what's funny about them. Alas, an opportunity lost, for both Conan, to make a funny commercial, and for Bud Light to rebound from their absolutely beyond awful drinkability campaign.