Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (23 page)

L
ast week I promised that in today’s column I would announce which commercial, according to my survey, you readers hate the most. So if you have an ounce of sense or good taste, you’ll stop reading this column right now.

Really, I mean it…

This is your last chance …

You’re making a HUGE mistake …

Okay, you pathetic fool: The most hated commercial of all time, according to the survey, was the one for Charmin featuring “Mr. Whipple” and various idiot housewives who lived in a psycho pervert community where everybody was obsessed with squeezing toilet paper—or, as they say in Commercial Land, “bathroom tissue.” Americans still, after all these years, feel more hostility toward that ad campaign than they ever did toward international communism.

Of course some people will say: “But those ads sold a lot of Charmin!”

Yes, and the Unabomber produced high-quality, handcrafted letter bombs. But that doesn’t make it
right
.

The Mr. Whipple ads are related to a whole category of
commercials that, according to the survey, people really detest—namely, commercials that discuss extremely intimate bodily functions and problems, often at dinnertime. People do not wish to hear total strangers blurting out statements about their constipation and their diarrhea and their hemorrhoids and their “male itch.” People do not wish to see scientific demonstrations of pads absorbing amazing quantities of fluids. People also cannot fathom why this fluid is always blue. As Carla and Bill Chandler put it: “If anyone around here starts secreting anything BLUE, the last thing we’re going to worry about is how absorbent their pad is.”

People do not wish to hear any more about incontinence. Rich Klinzman wrote: “I have often fantasized about sneaking up behind June Allyson, blowing up a paper bag, and slamming my fist into it, just to see how absorbent those adult diapers really are.”

People also do not wish to see actors pretending to be mothers and daughters talking about very personal feminine matters as though they were discussing the weather. Richard J. O’Neil, expressing a common sentiment, wrote: “If I was a woman, I would walk on my lips through a sewage plant before I would share this kind of information with any living soul, let alone my mother.”

People do not wish to see extreme close-ups of other people chewing.

People are also getting mighty tired of the endlessly escalating, extremely confusing war of the pain relievers. At one time, years ago, there was just aspirin, which was basically for headaches; now, there are dozens of products, every single one of which seems to be telling you that, not only is it more
effective
than the other ones, but also the other ones
could cause a variety of harmful side effects such as death. It seems safer to just live with the headache.

Many survey respondents were especially scornful of the commercials suggesting that you can undergo an actual surgical procedure, such as a Caesarean section, and the only pain medication you’d need afterward is Tylenol. As Gwen Marshall put it: “If my doctor had given me Tylenol and expected me to be pain-free and happy, I’d have jumped off of that lovely table that holds your legs ten feet apart, grabbed the twelve-inch scalpel out of his hand, and held it to his throat until I got morphine, lots of it.”

Another type of advertising that people detest is the Mystery Commercial, in which there is no earthly way to tell what product is being advertised. These commercials usually consist of many apparently random images flashing rapidly past on the screen, and then, at the end, you see a Nike swoosh, or the IBM logo, or Mr. Whipple.

People are sick and tired of seeing actors pretend to be deeply emotionally attached to their breakfast cereals. People also frankly do not believe that the woman in the Special K commercials got to be thin and shapely by eating Special K. Patricia Gualdoni wrote: “I have eaten enough Special K cereal to sink a battleship, and I look a lot more like a battleship than the woman in the ad.”

People are also skeptical of the Denorex shampoo commercials. “How do we know that that tingling sensation isn’t battery acid eating through your scalp?” asked Alyssa Church.

Here are just a few of the other views expressed by the thousands of readers who responded to the survey:

—Andy Elliott wrote: “I hate radio ads that say, ‘Our
prices are so low, we can’t say them on the radio!’ WHY??? Will people start bleeding from the ears if they hear these prices?”

—Michael Howard wrote: “I live near Seattle and there is one channel that runs commercials approximately every five minutes advertising the fact that they have a helicopter. Can you believe it? A
helicopter!”

—A.J. VanHorn theorized that “the increase in suicides among young people is due to the beer commercial showing a bunch of rednecks in a beat-up pickup swigging beer from cans and telling everyone ‘It don’t git no better’n this.’”

—Kathy Walden objected to “Wal-Mart commercials that shamelessly try to portray all Wal-Mart customers as poor, uneducated, rural, and concerned primarily with reproducing themselves. Of course this is true, but STILL …”

There were many, many more strong comments, but I’m out of space. So I’m going to close with a statement penned by a reader identifying himself as “Flat Foot Sam,” who I believe spoke for millions of consumers when he wrote these words:

I
t’s time once again for our popular consumer health feature, “You Should Be More Nervous.”

Today we’re going to address an alarming new trend, even scarier in some ways than the one we discussed several years ago concerning the danger of airplane toilets sucking out your intestines (if you had forgotten about that one, we apologize for bringing it up again, and we ask you to please put it out of your mind).

We were made aware of this new menace when alert reader Edna Aschenbrenner sent us an item from an Enterprise, Oregon, newspaper called—get ready for a great newspaper name—
The Wallowa County Chieftain
. The
Chieftain
runs a roundup of news from the small town of Imnaha (suggested motto: “It’s ‘Ahanmi’ Spelled Backward!”). On March 14, this roundup, written by Barbara Kriley, began with the following story, which I am not making up:

“A bald eagle sabotaged the Imnaha power line for an hour and a half outage Wednesday with a placenta from the Hubbard Ranch calving operation. The eagle dropped the
afterbirth across the power lines, effectively shorting out the power.”

This is a truly alarming story We’re talking about a
bald eagle
, the proud symbol of this great nation as well as Budweiser beer. We don’t know about you, but we always
trusted
eagles; we assumed that when they were soaring majestically across the skies, they were
protecting
us—scanning the horizon, keeping an eye out for storm fronts, Russian missiles, pornography, etc. But now we find out, thanks to the
Chieftain
, that they’re not protecting us at all: They’re up there dropping cow placentas. They’ve already demonstrated that they can take out the Imnaha power supply; it would be child’s play for them to hit a human.

Nobody
is safe. Can you imagine what would happen to our democratic system of government if, just before election day, one of the leading presidential contenders, while speaking at an outdoor rally, were to be struck on the head by a cow afterbirth traveling at 120 miles per hour?

Nothing, that’s what would happen. First off, your presidential contenders do not ever stop speaking for any reason, including unconsciousness. Second, they’re used to wearing ridiculous headgear to garner support from some headgear-wearing group or another. It would be only a matter of time before ALL the leading contenders were sporting cow placentas.

But a direct hit could have a disastrous effect on ordinary taxpayers. That is why we are issuing the following urgent plea to the personnel at the Hubbard Ranch and every other calving operation within the sound of our voice: PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE UNATTENDED PLACENTAS LYING AROUND. This is especially important if you see eagles loitering
nearby, trying to look bored, smoking cigarettes, acting as though they could not care less. Please dispose of your placentas in the manner prescribed by the U.S. Surgeon General; namely, mail them, in secure packaging, to
The Ricki Lake Show
. Thank you.

We wish we could tell you that the Imnaha attack was an isolated incident, but we cannot—not in light of a news item from the
Detroit Free Press
, written by Kate McKee and sent in by many alert readers, concerning a Michigan man who was struck in an extremely sensitive area—you guessed it; his rental car—by a five-pound sucker fish falling from the sky. I am also not making this up. The man, Bob Ringewold, was quoted as saying that the fish was dropped by a “young eagle.” (The article doesn’t say how he knew the eagle was young; maybe it was wearing a little baseball cap backward.) The fish dented the roof of the car, although Ringewold was not charged for the damage (this is why you car renters should always take the Optional Sucker Fish Coverage).

And here comes the bad news: This is NOT the scariest recent incident involving an airborne fish. We have here an Associated Press item, sent in by many alert readers, which begins:

“A Brazilian fisherman choked to death near the remote Amazon city of Belem after a fish unexpectedly jumped into his mouth.”

The item—we are still not making any of these items up—states that “the six-inch-long fish suddenly leapt out of the river” while the fisherman “was in the middle of a long yawn.”

Of course this could be simply a case of a fish—possibly a young fish, inexperienced or on drugs—not paying attention
to where it was going and jumping into somebody’s mouth. On the other hand, it could be something much more ominous. It could be that fish in general, after thousands of years of being hounded by fishermen and dropped on rental cars, are finally deciding to fight back in the only way they know how.

If so, there is trouble ahead. You know those Saturday-morning professional-bass-fishing programs on TV? We should start monitoring those programs closely, because the fish on those programs are probably SICK AND TIRED of always playing the role of victims. It is only a matter of time before there is a situation where a couple of televised angling professionals are out on a seemingly peaceful lake, casting their lures, and they happen to yawn, and suddenly the water erupts in fury as dozens of vengeful bass launch themselves like missiles and deliberately lodge themselves deep into every available angler orifice. And we would NOT want to miss that.