Fat Guy in a Little Controversy

When I saw this ad, my first reactions were: Aww, fat guy in a little coat! I love that scene! and then Hey, Chris Farley is dead, so what the hell are they doing using him in a DirecTV commercial? Apparently I wasn't alone in thinking it was a little problematic making a dead person into a spokesman for your company.

According to this article (nitpick: the article incorrectly refers to the scene as "Fat Boy in a Little Coat," suggesting that the author had never even seen this classic scene before and therefore isn't in the best position to comment on how wrong it is that they turned it into a commercial... but whatever...), Chris Farley's family was totally on board with the ad, and David Spade thought it was a nice tribute to his friend, so everyone on board apparently has a clear conscience about the whole thing and doesn't intend to apologize or pull the ad.

I'm not going to tear into David Spade for this (though Gawker had no qualms about doing so). I blame Farley's family for giving their consent, and DirecTV for having poor taste. To paraphrase the late great Bill Hicks (hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if they used him in an advertisement? maybe for Orange Drink?), when you do a commercial, you're a corporate fucking shill. You're off the artistic roll call. Everything you say is suspect, and every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink. (Bill meant his own drink, but hey, mine too.) So the thing is, when you choose to do an endorsement, it's like when an amateur goes pro -- you can't go back. From now on, when someone hears you say something, they will not know if you sincerely believe it or if someone just paid you to say it. So apparently David Spade made the calculation and thought, OK, the amount of money they're paying me makes it worth doing this. But poor Chris Farley doesn't have the luxury of making that kind of choice, now, does he? Maybe you don't think that's so bad, but think about it this way: there's a whole generation of people out there who were not yet born when Tommy Boy came out and might not have ever seen it, so the next time they see Chris Farley on TV their first thought may well be "Hey, it's the guy from the DirecTV ad!"

Maybe Chris Farley did other endorsements during his lifetime, in which case he was a corporate shill anyway (I'd still love the guy if that were true). Even so, the decision to use one's own talent and reputation in support of selling a particular product is one that only an individual can make for him/herself, and no matter how well his family knew Chris Farley they can't know for sure that he would have wanted to do an ad for fucking DirecTV. I'd like to think he wouldn't.

While I'm on this subject, have you all seen Jeff Bridges' ads for Duracell and Hyundai? Very un-Dude...

Nice

I was glad to see this article on Slate.com today.

And, happily, I had some kind of problem loading the comments page, so I wasn't able to read the comments (despite which fact I am still confident that I could recite them to you almost verbatim). It was an all-around very enjoyable reading experience that has inspired me to stop reading comments in general -- except for the ones you post on my blog, of course, dear readers.