You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
Grüns gummies

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
Our gummies are perfect for these ridiculous clowns, just like you!

This ad is what I like to call “humor adjacent”. While there are a few genuine jokes in there, much of it doesn’t have the characters doing or saying anything inherently funny. But damn if the direction and the performances aren’t doing their darndest to make it seem funny.

Like, take a look at these lines:

“Where can I get more?”
“It tastes like sweet, sweet berries.”
“And these are vegan, too, right? I don’t like to hurt animals.”

Written down, none of them are funny at all, not in the context of the ad nor outside it – they’re just very normal things for a person to say. But there seems to have been a directive to try and make them jokes. If the lines themselves aren’t funny, you can still ridiculously overact their delivery, and punctuate the lines with unexpected camerawork and musical stings. All the trappings of an over-the-top comedy, just without any underlying punchline to support it.

Feels like maybe they were handed a commercial script that was both overlong (three minutes and fifteen frickin’ seconds!) and mostly pretty dry, not the sort of the thing that would keep viewers engaged for even a fraction of that runtime. So they tried salvaging it in production, doing everything they could to create the impression of humor and entertainment, no matter how little they were given to work with.

That’s just my speculation, of course. And I don’t want to discount how jokes can be derived entirely from the delivery – the right production and performance can make almost anything funny. I don’t think this ad particularly succeeds at that, but they’re trying. They’re very visibly, awkwardly, painfully trying.