The Super Bowl is the most watched television event of the year, and has been for a long time now, so it's become a notoriously high-profile landing spot for commercials. Companies pull out all the stops to produce memorable ads designed to be remembered by drunk football fans eating nachos and hollering at the TV screen. Maybe you don't watch the Super Bowl--my facebook feed was certainly full of people who seemed eager to distance themselves from the event--but I've been a football fan since I was 4 years old, and I watch every year, regardless of which teams are playing. I'd like to pretend that I'm the sort of person who is immune to the charms of any commercial, but I tend to find stupid humor really entertaining, so there are always a few Super Bowl commercials that crack me up. Here were my favorites this year:
#5: Coke Chase
This one was a bit overexposed--in recent years, companies have started running preview commercials for their Super Bowl commercials, which is a bit ridiculous, and while Mercedes-Benz's ad featuring "Sympathy For The Devil" by the Rolling Stones and Willem Dafoe as Satan was the prime offender this year where that was concerned, Coke got into the act with the Coke Chase as well. People were apparently voting online for who they wanted to get the Cokes first--and some people complained that being unable to vote for the Arabian guy with the camels was racist. I'm staying well away from that debate, but I had to put this commercial on my list just for the moment when the burlesque girls on the bus shoot the horseback-riding cowboy with a cannon that fires purple paint, glitter, and confetti. The cowboy throwing his empurpled hat into the spokes of one of the motorcycle guys was a nice touch as well. Spoiler alert: at the end of the Super Bowl, we learned that the burlesque girls won the race. The ending was kind of underwhelming, actually, though not as underwhelming as that 40 minute power outage in the middle of the third quarter. That sucked.
#4: Oreo Whisper Fight
The main premise of this one--people are fighting in a library (over whether the creme or the cookie part of an Oreo is better, which, who cares? Just eat it) so they keep whispering even as chaos ensues--is kind of dumb, let's face it. But people knocking over bookshelves, throwing furniture at each other, and a general glorification of wanton destruction? That's always a positive in my book. The part at the end where the cops bust in and say "You have to stop fighting--we're the cops!" only sort of works, and really this one constantly teeters on the edge of being totally dumb, but girls hitting old men with chairs and people falling from a second-story balcony onto a table that then shatters makes this whole thing just pro-wrestling enough for me to love.
#3: Old Spice: Irresistible
Old Spice have been the kings of over-the-top absurd commercials for years now, so they went for a more subtle form of ridiculousness with this one, in which a girl with a Eurotrash accent falls for some mysterious James Bond type at a mansion party that looks like it takes place in 1965. But get this--the guy's got two wolves hanging from his shoulders! Either that bit cracks you up completely and makes the entire ad, or this one falls totally flat, but if you're me, it's definitely the former. Old Spice will never scale the magnificent heights of the "I'm on a horse" guy again, but they're still holding their own if this commercial is any indication.
#2: Samsung Mobile USA: The Next Big Thing
OK, most of these could be regarded as pretty stupid if you're in an uncharitable mood, but I really don't know how anyone hates on this one. Here's the pitch: Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, and Bob Odenkirk in a conference room generating ideas for Samsung's Super Bowl commercial while really just making fun of each other for two minutes. This one is kind of meta for the drunk sports-fan demographic, in fact--especially since it ran late in the fourth quarter, when I'm sure most dudes were nine beers in and just wanted to see if Colin Kaepernick could throw one last touchdown pass (spoiler alert: apparently not). But if you watch it again now, while you're sober (or hung over, as the case may be), you'll probably get the subtler, more cerebral jokes like the slam on crowdsourcing and the bit where LeBron James makes a cameo appearance on a tablet to suggest that he make a cameo appearance on a tablet. If nothing else, though, it's worth it to watch Rudd and Rogen bash each other for being old and fat, respectively.
#1: Kia: Space Babies/Hotbots
Home run. I knew this was the best commercial of the night the second I saw it. A father improvising the awesomest bullshit answer to the "where babies come from" question ever--a planet filled with babies who ride rocket ships to Earth, complete with scenes of space panda babies giving the thumbs up and calves parachuting from the upper atmosphere while making hilarious cow noises (all cow noises are hilarious). And then the kid punctures that fairy story with something that sounds dangerously close to the correct answer to his question, at which point his parents attempt to distract him by playing "Wheels On The Bus" over the sound system. That's the stupid part, but the entire space baby planet section of the commercial is gold. Kia scores bonus points by also contributing a commercial this year in which hot female robots exhibit a brand new car to a rapt crowd, only to beat the hell out of the first guy who actually touches it. Go ahead and watch that one too:
And then watch my all-time favorite hilariously stupid Super Bowl commercial--an early-90s vintage Bud Light spot in which a farting horse spoils a romantic date. Do you smell barbecue?