There’s a laxative ad that’s been playing pretty regularly (heh heh, regularly) on TV lately. The product is Senokot-S, which I’m sure is a fine and effective constipation relief product. But the commercial’s narrator says “S” in a way that it sounds just like “Ass,” so when he says “Senokot-S tablets” or “Senokot-S” it sounds like “Senokot ass tablets” or “Senokot Ass.” It’s enough to make me look up from what I’m doing every time. And to top it off, I didn’t realize the pills were for constipation until I rewatched the ad today, and that just makes it like ten times funnier. They ARE ass tablets!
P.S. I would have posted a video if I could find one…if you can locate one, please post it in the comments!
They’re totally lame. There have been some fairly innovative anti-drug ads lately, like “Stoners in the Mist,” this amazing series of online potheads-as-safari-animals shorts on the website AbovetheInfluence.org.
But this steroid shit is a straight-up throwback to the after-school specials I grew up with, and demonstrates that annoying tendency ads aimed at ’straightening up’ tweens have where they use a totally hip and with it tone to try to fool the kids into thinking something entertaining is about to happen, then they preach at you a little without giving you any solid reasons you shouldn’t do the specific drug (unless it’s a gross-out tactic like showing you a rotting corpse’s lung). No, they don’t give you facts, they just keep saying that your life is like a thousand times more meaningful if you play soccer and act really smug about being straight edge, as opposed to smoking the occasional joint and/or having a beer or two on a night out. Have you ever actually met a straight-edge person? I don’t mean like your aunt who doesn’t drink because she’s past the age of doing anything fun, I mean someone young and at the height of their life who won’t so much as take a hit off a cigarette on a Saturday night. Did you ever notice that there’s something all of these holier-than-thou straight-edgers have in common? That’s right, they’re big, fat, LOSERS.
So naturally, I now assume that steroids are actually not that bad for you and the government just wants to keep them away from us because they’re like magical candy that gives you superpowers. Now if only I worked out or had any reason to care about muscle mass. Oh well, I’ll just stick to my current exercise regimen: the 6 blocks to the subway twice a week on my way to the bar plan. I think it’s working!
So I was just watching an ad for Requip, a big-name drug for Restless Legs Syndrome. Here’s one of them…
Restless Legs Syndrome, or “RLS,” as they’d like you to start calling it, is still highly disputed in terms of legitimacy, but the very vagueness of the symptoms and the difficulty of diagnosis make RLS a marketing director’s dream. Every hypochondriac with a TV is a potential target, and indeed, when you hear about a disease described only with sketchy terms like “creepy-crawly sensations” and “restlessness,” it’s pretty damn hard not to get sucked in yourself.
But whether or not this condition actually exists, much less affects 10% of the U.S. population, as some claim, the drug ads are annoying as shit. And this one had to have been the weirdest one I’ve seen, because right in the middle of the small print narration, right after the disturbing revelation that test subjects experienced trancelike episodes while driving, the narrator says that you should contact your doctor if you begin to have uncontrollable urges for gambling and sexual activity. Gambling and sexual activity?!
If this disorder really affects 10% of the population, and we assume (however naïvely) that the people taking all those millions of pills the drug companies are selling actually do suffer from RLS, then am I the only one who thinks things are about to get a lot more interesting around here? Imagine 30 million people — 30 million! — strung out and rampaging around Las Vegas and Reno and all those casinos on American Indian reservations with authentic-sounding bullshit names. Plus, they’re horny! Horny and spontaneously addicted to gambling. Good thing casinos and hookers are like peanut butter and jelly in this country. They just go together.
To top it off, one of the supposed causes of RLS is alcoholism, so barring the remote possibility that the RLS sufferers responsibly stop drinking when they start taking the pills, they’ll probably be drunk when these sudden urges to join a craps game or proposition a transvestite sex worker, which will weaken their resolve even further, guaranteeing them a night to remember.
But hey, at least their legs stopped feeling weird.
