There have been a few notable cases where comedians have caricatured a real product by creating a more extreme version of it, only to have that version become reality. The most famous is The Onion’s “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades”. Those of you who remember the animated series The Critic might also remember Jurassic Park II being offered up as a movie so ridiculous it would never be made (oops). And now you can add Bill Hicks to the list of visionaries who saw the humor in something that a corporation thinks should be taken seriously (if you didn’t have him there already…).
Bill had a joke about the ultimate television commercial, which would feature a beautiful woman nude and playing with herself while the screen flashed the words “Drink Coke”. But that’s far too explicit to show up in a real advertisement, right?
If anything, it’s not explicit enough. Enter Shai Clothing, a Paris-based clothing catalog. I can’t describe what they’ve done half as well as the poor reporter who had to write this story, so I’ll just quote it:
Read that again. Let it sink in. That’s right: they’re filming porn stars fucking in order to promote their clothing.
The videos are available through the link. I’m not including the URL here because they’re so far beyond work-safe that the light from work-safe won’t reach them for years. If at any point you want more information about the clothes that the performers are (not) wearing, you can simply point to them with your mouse and get all the information.
[sub][sup](And I did see the date on that release, but this doesn’t seem to have been mentioned here, so I figure it’s new to us.)[/sup][/sub]
Ultrafilter, your reverse psychological grass roots ad campaign for Shai Clothing has worked on me. I will be investigating thier products at length when I get home…
Way back in the late 70’s, while living in Berlin, I went down to the subway station to wait for my train and there, on the wall of the station, was a huge billboard of about 6 or 7 totally nude men - granted, their bodies had been spray painted white, but there was no doubt these were real guys, totally, full-frontal, nude.
I noticed the Germans in the station casting a glance at the billboard and then moving on.
About four weeks went by - the billboards were all over the city subway stations.
Finally, after about week five, I went down to the station and there was a new billboard of the same exact men, this time without the white spray paint. They were all bare-chested and bare-foot, but wearing (Lee?) jeans. I think the caption was something like, “Sometimes sexy is what you put ON”.
Not exactly porn, but can you imagine a series of billboards depicting nude men all over the subway stations in any city in the US? Europeans just thought the ads were clever - here in the US there would have been an outcry for public decency - and this was in the 70’s!
Thanks. I was trying to work in a joke about how I never thought that showing two guys ejaculating on each other was a good way to sell clothes and that’s why I’m not in advertising, but I just couldn’t get it to come out right.
Odd. I did a search, but nothing showed up. Ah well, search has been flaky ever since we upgraded to vB 3.x, so I blame the software.
Not really. I got bored and changed it.
There’s actually a little bit of a story behind the new one. One day back when I was in sitting in high school, the guy behind me tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention. Naturally, I looked straight up. He was kind enough to point out that the tap came from him, not the leprechaun on the ceiling. For whatever reason, I remembered that and decided that I should be on the ceiling too, living among the leprechauns and other fey folk.
I saw one a couple of weeks ago. It was an advertisement for some sort of beauty cream…or lotion or something…anyway, it had one of the VP’s of the company (as well as everyone else in the commercial) totally naked. The tie in was something like “nothing to hide”. Interesting…but come on…you’re really just using T&A to get everyone’s attention. Still it was interesting that it was a real executive of the company up there butt naked.
Damn, missed the edit window. Anyway, here’s a link to the site for that commercial on beauty products. It’s NSFW because of the nudity, not the link location itself. It’s a legitimate beauty product company.
The site seems to be safe in terms of not installing crap on your computer, but I am using Firefox, so…
Again, these are very seriously not safe for work. I’ve disabled the links, so you’ll have to copy and paste. If you quote this post, scroll down a bit and uncheck the box next to “Automatically parse links in text” before you go to submit.
IIRC, SNL did one of those parody commercials about blade proliferation on men’s razors that pre-empted that Onion piece by the better part of a decade. Just saying.
Much better than a decade. IIRC, the original version of that commercial aired on the very first SNL episode in 1975, and touted :gasp: a 3 bladed razor! The tag line was “Because you’ll believe anything!”
