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∙EXISTENTIAL SLAPSTICK. This genre seems to mix Mack Sennett and Samuel Beckett. A woman, responding to the call "Where's the Open Pit?", dashes across the lawn with a bottle of Open Pit barbecue sauce and disappears into an open pit. A baker, having carelessly forgotten his Vicks Cough Silencers, tosses pizza dough into the air, coughs and catches it splat in the face. Splat again, as the Pond's girl gets schlopped in the eye with cold cream. And whack! umph! and aaagh! as a mousy little guy, sploshed with Hai Karate after-shave lotion, brutally chops down a scent-crazed female on the make. Nothing like a little good-natured sadism to punch home a point.
∙FUN SEX. Currently the best example of this type is the ad in which a blonde looks straight through the camera and coos, "Take it off. Take it off. Take it all off!" while the music rips through a bump-and-grind melody. Of course she is really talking to some guy shaving with Noxzema, and she is referring to his beard. At first it seems wrong. Isn't it the man who is supposed to shout: "Take it off"? But in an instant, the reversal of roles becomes rather charming and even sexy, which is more than can be said for shaving. The girl, incidentally, is Gunilla Knutsson, Miss Sweden of 1961, but her heavy accent still sounds like a put-on.
∙LOW SATIRE. Some commercials kid themselves, some razz the production style of various other products. A Jeno's pizza skit kids the halitosis hucksters. Marilyn says: "I'll tell you what your problem is, Gloria. You have bad pizza. Bad pizza!" After Gloria switches to Jeno's, Marilyn tries another tack: "Now I'd like to talk about your deodorant." Gloria: "Marilyn, how would you like a nice belt in the mouth?" A small masterpiece, worthy of Jonathan Winters or the late Ernie Kovacs.
∙HIGH SATIRE. Relatively high, anyhow. Benson & Hedges gets a lot of laughs as it demonstrates the disadvantages of smoking its longer cigarette: a jewel thief hides behind the drapes, but his B & H sticks through and gives him away; a girl writes in to thank B & H for the extra length, since it comes in handy on her job she sticks it in her mouth while a marksman flicks it with his bullwhip.
How Many Millimeters? Good gags, as any adman knows, stick in the mind. And so do successful commercials, so much so that they keep coming back like a bad memory. Shell once got good mileage out of a spot in which a driverless car went rolling off to a Shell station to lap up some gas with TCP. So now Sinclair shows an auto deserting a pair of newlyweds to get a quick belt of KRC. A few years ago, Chevrolet displayed a car atop a spire-like butte in the Mojave Desert. Ah so, said the Toyota people, and right away they airlifted their sedan to the top of Fujiyama. Now in what promises to become the acrophobia sell, there is a new hair-coloring ad showing a girl atop another outcropping in the Colorado high country declaring to the world that "New Dawn sets you free."