165: Gay Ad - Schmitt's Gay Beer

from Saturday Night Live, 28 September 1991
Housesitter #1.....Chris Farley
Housesitter #2.....Adam Sandler

This is pretty much a detail perfect parody of American beer ads in the late 80’s/early 90s. The policy of blatant displays of jiggly female flesh-appeal used to flog beer to young heterosexual men, is here turned on its head with equally and ludicrously explicit displays of male flesh to entice the homosexuals. These beer ads always started with a couple of all-American young men in some situation that was just no fun at all. And every Americans consumer is entitled to constant fun - anything else would be an infringement of their Constitutional rights. So, the solution is to just open a beer cooler (you need a whole cooler of the stuff because American beer has all the flavour and potency of something strained through a sickly donkey’s last kidney). Instantly, the sun comes out making everything magically brighter and more appealing, a raucous rock n’roll track starts blaring in the background, and hordes of nubile, barely clad lovelies with mammaries that’d inspire the Graf von Zeppelin are leaping about all over the scenery. The young men turn to the camera and thank the beer for making everything better. Oh yes, and everyone has been holding a beer in every bloody shot. Fun = tits= beer. God, I wish I had the ingenious insight into the human mind that would allow me to be an advertising executive.
The SNL crew follow exactly the same commercial formula, only all homosexual-like. The joke is about beer ads, not homosexuals per se. The point of these sort of ads is always to instil a fairly base Pavlovian sexual association with the particular brand being advertised. For the parody to work, it therefore has to show the same level of open unabashed homosexual desire – Farley and Sandler staring at the models, taking photographs and other assorted horseplay. In showing that, without sneering at it, this is a fairly positive parody. The tagline about “If you’ve got a big thirst and you’re gay” incidentally shows up how ridiculous much of the pink economy was before it even existed.