It seems as if it were only yesterday that America
first saw the heart-rendering TV commercial in which Mean Joe Greene, a
professional football player from the 1970s, throws a jersey to a young boy who
offered him a Coke. The commercial, first introduced in 1979, makes all the
lists of Top 10 or Top 25 American TV commercials of all time.
A recent TV spot parodies the Mean Joe commercial
of decades ago. In the new spot, Joe throws his jersey to a housewife, played
to soccer-and-bake-sale-mom perfection by sometimes raunchy comic actress Amy
Sedaris. The camera angle exaggerates the difference in size between the
characters much more than the original spot did. The housewife tosses a
bottle of Downy laundry detergent to Mean Joe, looking sharp and very buff for
a guy in his mid-60s. When Mean Joe lobs his jersey to her, she smells it,
makes a disgusted face and throws it right back to him.
A great spoof.
TV commercials have parodied TV shows, movies and
other art forms for decades. And parody or travesty sometimes enters into the occasional
revival of an old ad concept like the resurrections of Mr. Clean, Joe Isuzu and
Charlie the Tuna, which are all cases of a TV commercial making fun of
itself.
But this laundry soap commercial may mark the first
time we’ve seen a television commercial that pays homage to a commercial for a
different product.
What does it say about our cultural vocabulary when
to understand and appreciate a television commercial, you need to know about a
30-year-old television commercial for something else?
Cultural vocabulary comprises the quotes and images
of literature, the visual arts, entertainment, current events and other
cultural phenomena that people need to know to understand the cultural
references that abound in the mass media, the popular arts and general
conversation. Our cultural vocabulary consists of many artifacts:
·
Real and fictional people, such as Adam & Eve,
Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Pascal and Don Quixote.
·
Events, e.g., Hannibal crossing the Alps, the
Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong
stepping foot on the moon.
·
Phrases, e.g., quotes from poems, books, movies and
songs, anything from “No can do” and “Let’s get it on” to “To be or not to be,”
from “Four score and seven years ago” to “I have a dream.”
·
Inanimate objects, e.g., the Bible, the Holy Grail
or a Super Bowl ring.
·
Archetypes, e.g., the henpecked husband, the genius
who is inept with women, the good prostitute, the cop who can’t follow orders,
the stupid or buffoonish strongman, the evil businessman, the evil stepmother,
the bumbling leader and the tragic young lovers. These archetypes are often
embodied in people or characters who enter the cultural vocabulary: Archie
Bunker, James Bond, Hercules, Stepin Fetchit, for example.
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