I have one. You have one. Animals have them. While guys getting hit in the groin may still be popular, the biggest thing in advertising these days is your butt (not literally, of course). It started with the “does this dress make my butt look big?” commercial a few years ago. No one complained, so butts got a leg up on other body parts. Now, butts are all over the air.
During the Super Bowl, NBC ran a spot asking, “What happened to your butt?” The answer: people laughed theirs off at the new network shows. One woman had her butt reattached six times. If you think butts are funny, you’re laughing right now.
In another spot for T-Mobile, a man’s butt calls his wife by accident on his cell phone.
His butt called her.
She’s having a conversation with his butt during the spot. Should be funny, right? Not so much. Is it an issue in America, butts calling people? Are they getting wrong numbers, insulting people, generally making asses out of themselves? Has your butt been doing things you don’t know about? At the end of the spot, the guy hops up and lands on his butt and snarls at his wife, “My butt hung up on you.” Logo fades up. Butt humor. Ha, ha.
When a butt is the butt of your joke, it’s kind of like being in 8th grade again. Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that butts are funny (more to guys than women) but they’re not unique. Everyone has a butt. But we’ve always had butts. So why are our butts just now showing up in commercials? Advertising has been filled with asses for years. We’ve been kissing asses like no other industry since long before Bernbach. I worked for a creative director who constantly yelled, “Let’s kick some ass.” He wanted “kick-ass work” and he kicked ours to get it, even making us work on Christmas Day. He’d have loved these butt commercials.
We’ve had talking heads and now we have talking butts. Our butts are stars. Christian Bale’s butt got all upset the other day. Beyonce’s butt made a cool video. Mark my word, I predict by the fall, a butt will have it’s own TV show. Like “House” and “Lost” – Tonight, on “Butt.”
Rush Limbaugh is available, too. He’s been talking out of his for years.