How Dumb Are We?

I saw a commercial while eating lunch at my desk. I eat lunch at my desk because that’s the only surface in my studio apartment besides the futon in case that sounded like I was a really committed, hard worker. Anyways, this was a commercial for where the host was serving chicken from his grill but then they “pulled away the curtain” and they showed that he was taking the chicken out of the box and putting it on the grill.  Cue guffaws. I only say guffaws because I don’t really know the sound one makes when one guffaws but I imagine it would be the only one that would be emitted at something so unfunny. I tend to make the fake DJ laugh out loud when I see those kinds of things.

I’m not really making fun of the <chicken franchise that shall not be named> because I’ve seen similar commercials from other fast food and regular speed restaurants. What I’m questioning is “how dumb are we?”

Because the simple fact is that in this corporate machine age we live in, money is not spent unless money is not made. So there must be focus groups and charts and data and wasted airline tickets that back-up the notion that people find this funny. Or people find it appealing enough to go to the  over Taco Bell. And I say Taco Bell with 90% assurance that Taco Bell never used that motif for advertising because you can’t really hide behind a grill and make a taco. And who would take the meat out and put it on the grill to pretend to put it back in there? It’d be a mess, with the lettuce and the grated cheese accidentally spilling into the grill. Besides they had that dog and now they just have a new flavor every 7-10 days.

So really it comes down to us. We think that’s clever, we give it our seal of approval the same way we do the Kardashians, which I also noticed at lunch that the Huffington Post front page had four headlines out of twenty in their sidebar about them. Headlines and the front page, not the entertainment or the celebrity page.

Are we so tired of bad news that we’ll laugh at anything remotely funny? To be honest, I don’t think so. I think the quality of funny, the quality of intelligence, the quality of quality is a little down. Not to say we’re not capable, we’re just not doing it. I know that I was lazy as a performer because what I knew worked, and I’m really striving now with this blog and my writing. Because it excites me. So maybe we just need to be excited again.

Then again, maybe it’s just chicken and I’ve read too much into it. Let me know what you think.