It's kind of bizarre that the Planters marketing team came up with the idea to kill Mr. Peanut before the idea that they could build an ad around the word "roasted" having a second definition.
Alternately, maybe they just dodged this idea for as long as they could, because it never had any real hope of being funny.
There's an episode of The Office where Michael organizes a roast of himself, thinking it's going to be extremely low-impact if not wholly flattering, and instead his employees take the opportunity to actually roast the shit out of him; the segment ends with Michael choking up and storming off. That's illustrative of the general problem with roasts, or perhaps more specifically with the modern "roast industry" that has emerged over the past couple decades: everyone wants the cachet of "getting roasted," but a roast only truly works when the subject has sufficiently thick skin and a sense of humor about themselves such that nothing is really off-limits. This is why by far the best roasts are those of comedians, who get it. By comparison, remember when Comedy Central decided to do a roast of Donald Trump and he vetoed any jokes about how he wasn't actually that rich? (He didn't have any problem with the jokes about him wanting to fuck his own daughter, which... anyway.) You can't roast someone with veto power over the content - and that's exactly what you get when the "person" being "roasted" is an animated spokescharacter for a billion-dollar corporate brand, in a commercial that brand paid for.
For that matter, how were you ever going to roast a fictional peanut? He doesn't have life history to make fun of, he doesn't really have a personality... in this teaser, the jokes we see are mostly about peanuts in general, plus two jokes about his appearance. Here's the entire, ahem, "set list":
"I'll make this quick, Mr. Peanut, I know you've got some brownies to ruin"
"Mr. Peanut, why are you dressed like it's five recessions ago?"
"Mr. Peanut, what do you eat at parties? People?"
"I'm a big fan, I love your work in Thai food"
"We can all agree: there's rich, and then there's 'haven't worn pants in 100 years' rich"
Don't forget, the roastee is allowed to get in on the act himself!
"Wow, that was brutal. Wish Planters would just kill me off again!"
Well, he's not wrong: that WAS brutal. We might disagree on the exact definition of that word though.
Woof. While his look may be the easiest target, the best roast of Mr. Peanut's design was already done by Cohen Edenfield on Twitter an entire decade ago:
is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat
— Cohen is a ghost (@skullmandible) August 29, 2013
Not only is that funnier than either of the jokes about Mr. Peanut's look that we get here, but it actually gets under the skin a bit by making a capitalist critique, whereas the jokes here double (in frankly Trumpian fashion) as sly compliments about the subject's wealth. (Or anyway they would if Mr. Peanut were remotely a real person.)
Maybe there are some better jokes in the full roast, but there's no reason to believe that when this is what they ran with to whet our appetites. I'm not nearly enough of a masochist to sit through over ELEVEN MINUTES of this shit when the teaser is so dire. The single best joke here is Jeff Ross's about ruining brownies, and that's obviously pretty tame. (Side note: since when does Ross look like he got stopped halfway through morphing into Ving Rhames? If he didn't have the same voice as ever I wouldn't even have known it was him.) His other joke, the one about Thai food, isn't even a joke. (To be fair, it was clipped from a longer bit; to be less fair, I did watch enough of Ross's intro to the full roast to see what it was clipped from and it's not any funnier.) Ross is obviously more than capable of being funny at these things so I doubt any of this is really his fault other than accepting the gig at all, but then that's kind of my point; this entire concept was DOA no matter the caliber of comedian you involved.
I certainly don't subscribe to the older and/or right-wing comedian whining that "you can't say anything anymore!" Usually people who say that are griping that they'll get canceled if they keep doing their 1980s set featuring a ten-minute block about how much they hate Asian drivers or something similarly racist. But when it comes to a roast, you do need to be able to say virtually anything about your subject or there's just no point. And when there are corporate reins on your roast, that's never going to be possible.
All this wouldn't matter so much if the ad itself were a true one-off. "Roasting Mr. Peanut" is a passably amusing gag to build a single 30-second spot around, at least in theory, and in that scenario it wouldn't even really matter if the jokes were bad. But this wasn't just a punny gag. They were dead serious about doing this shit for real. In addition to shooting a full roast sequence lasting more than ten minutes and putting that online, they clipped multiple jokes (plus Mr. Peanut's animated laughter in response) and made those their own short videos on the Planters YouTube channel. They thought people were gonna find these jokes hilarious and want to share them with their friends. They thought they could go viral just by wanting it enough! It really is legitimately embarrassing.
Maybe Planters needs a marketing rethink. Between dramatically "killing off" their spokescharacter and now this, they seem to be trying rather desperately to find a gimmick that will attract online engagement. But I don't feel like it's been going very well, and besides, not every product should or needs to try for that. This is roasted nuts, not Mountain Dew or Taco Bell or whatever. Relax a little bit, will you?
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