Am I Just Humor-Impaired?

[kevin_standlee]

There are lots of annoying commercials out there, but one I heard just as I was pulling in to the parking lot at work today has been troubling me every time I hear it.

It's a commercial for AAA Auto Insurance. It features a woman talking about an accident her husband had. "He called and said, 'I've been in an accident.'"

She continues, "The first thing I said was, 'Was it your fault?'"

Every time I hear this, it jars me. The first question should be, "Are you okay?" What kind of spouse ignores the well-being of his/her partner and jumps straight to the liability question? It's way too mercenary for me.

Maybe the commercial is meant to be funny and I'm just not getting the joke or hearing intended irony in it.

Comments

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Wow. The first thing I *ever* ask is, "Are you okay?"

Without hearing it, I don't know if the intent was humorous...but reading it in black and white pixels, there's nothing funny about it to me. It just sounds like a really sad marriage.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

I've not heard it either -- an effect of mostly listening to non-commercial audio sources. But I agree there isn't anything funny there, at least not without knowing the characters involved.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I wrote to KCBS radio and asked them if they know of a link to the audio of that commercial. I'll post a link to it if I get a positive answer.

I usually have KCBS on while driving around the Bay Area for the traffic reports. From time to time I even get a name check for reporting trouble, as I have their traffic number on speed-and-voice-dial.

[solarbird]

Sure, but this is a commercial, not life, and has very sharp time constraints wherein they need to get as much pitch as possible in their 15 or 30 seconds. There's no humour; just an attempt to go straight to the pitch as quickly as possible. When they overdo it, you get reactions like this.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, and the rest of the commercial goes on about how nicely AAA Auto Insurance treated them. But while I definitely get value for money out of my AAA membership -- heck, just the trip-interruption insurance payment for the Tempe Trouble in July was worth about seven years of membership dues all by itself -- this commercial actively discourages me from ever wanting to insure my vehicle with them.

[twilight2000.livejournal.com]

has the same effect on me. The one thing you DON'T want your commercial to do is send people running *away*

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the Toyota Stalker ads? Where some salesguy intrudes on various personal moments to pluck Toyota?

[lobolance.livejournal.com]

It jars me. My take is different though; they're doing a reversal on the old/sexist tropes of the husband always asking the wife 'what did you do?' assuming it was her fault. However, I don't think it works any better now reversed than it did originally in the 60s.

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

I wrote radio commercials for years. There is always a way to improve something like this. I'd be willing to bet that some external factor -- the person(s) at AAA who have to sign off on the spot, or the account exec, or some other body along the way -- helped get it to this form.

An interesting (and often annoying) thing about these "actors speaking as if they were in real life" spots is that they rarely reflect how people really would talk, usually due to time constraints.