The Misanthrope's Corner - distasteful advertising - Brief Article - Column

National Review, August 12, 2002 by Florence King

My "Ugh" column really struck a nerve. So many of you sent me examples of offensive ads and clippings that I must now be in possession of the largest collection of pictures of toilets outside the ranks of the National Association for the Advancement of Coprophilia.

I have enough for the sequel some of you requested, but rather than labor the point I decided to turn the tables on you and write about the kind of explicitness that doesn't bother me a bit -- that, in fact, I enjoy.

Father Flanagan said, "There's no such thing as a bad boy"; adoption pioneer Edna Gladney said, "There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents"; and I say that earthy subjects are offensive only when they are badly presented.

Take laxative commercials. They usually feature a construction worker on a high building or a sports fan trapped in the uppermost stadium tier, praying that the harsh laxative they took won't "kick in" then and there.

"Kick in" is an updated version of "hit the fan" and is intended to trigger the same mental picture. But after the sufferer switches to the advertised brand, the Vesuvian imagery is replaced by the drumbeat of "gentle," "regular," "relaxed," and "natural," prompting our mind's eye to visualize a parade horse effortlessly producing huge curls of manure and dropping them along the route with that equine nonchalance that never fails to make children and other oafs smirk and snicker. These ads run the gamut of bathroom humor from spew to plop in 30 seconds, yet the industry considers them inoffensive, and worse, "creative."

Madison Avenue must have a treasonous mole burrowing in its midst because there is one series of laxative ads that departs from the formula. I always enjoy watching them because they follow the rules for high comedy and succeed as clever entertainment: the Phillips Milk of Magnesia couple, Lucille and Raymond.

Lucille constantly embarrasses her husband with her eerie talent for turning any conversation around to his constipation. She apparently carries a bottle of Phillips in her purse at all times, and whips it out at parties, merrily rattling on about Raymond's "problem," ignoring his hisses and frantic signals to shut up. The spots are funny because Lucille is utterly lacking in insight and self-knowledge. If she smirked, if she noticed Raymond's mortification, if she ever once exhibited even a shred of self-consciousness, the ad would be offensive. But because she's incapable of realizing that anything is amiss, her obtuseness rescues the ad from bathroom humor and turns it into comic material worthy of Burns and Allen.

Lucille is a classic example of that staple of wit, the "Candide character," the innocent and/or dense person who has no idea what is going on. Virtually any subject can be funny as long as a Candide is present to provide the salvaging innocence, but if everyone is in the know, it becomes vulgar.

The absence of the Candide figure is what makes American sit-coms so raunchy. It's not so much what the characters do or say, but rather that they all snicker and smirk. By contrast, British sit-coms turn unawareness into pure gold.

In Keeping Up Appearances, the eternally thwarted social climber Hyacinth Bucket (she insists on pronouncing it "Bouquet") has been so successful in steeling herself against unpleasant realities that she is no longer capable of placing a correct interpretation on anything.

She has no idea that her son, Sheridan, is gay. He never appears as a live character, but the audience doesn't need to see him to catch on -- Hyacinth's end of their phone calls tells us all we need to know: =93You and your friend Tarquin are doing the ironing? Oh, that's nice, dear. . . . You and Tarquin aren't interested in girls? Oh, Sheridan, you don't know how much that warms a mother's heart! . . . You're wearing a knee bandage? Oh, you must look like Mummy's little soldier! What, dear? Oh, well, then, Mummy's little poet or interior designer."

Just as Jaws was scarier before we saw the shark, keeping Sheridan off- camera enlists the innocence of the audience for greater comedic effect. If the scriptwriters permitted Sheridan to appear and be as campy as he obviously is, the Candide device would be dismantled and the comedy would turn into broad farce.

I have often said that movies could be censored without attention to religious or family values. All you need is a knowledge of the rules of literary structure, but sadly, the wrong people tend to be censors.

In 1953 the Maryland Board of Motion Picture Censors banned The Captain's Paradise, starring Alec Guinness as the bigamous captain of a ferry boat running between Gibraltar and Tangiers, with Celia Johnson as his prim English wife and Yvonne De Carlo as his sultry Moroccan wife.

All goes smoothly until the unfortunate Christmas when he gets their presents mixed up. He gives the Brit a bikini and the sex kitten an apron, but both are overjoyed because Celia has always longed to be sexy and Yvonne has always longed to be domestic. The humor springs not from the bigamy but from an innocent mistake. If he had mixed the gifts up on purpose it would be a movie about a bigamist playing sex games, but the accidental element underscores the theme of human contrariness and gives the story a valuable moral: Don't take people for granted because there is more to them than meets the eye; everyone has a secret life.