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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Pauses that refreshed

March 6, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV commercials rank high among the clearest and most vivid memories of my boyhood. One reason why this is so should be obvious: I saw many of them repeatedly. In many cases, they also stuck in my mind because of their deliberate, purposeful banality. (Few things are as hard to forget as a simple-minded jingle.) On occasion, though, the music for a commercial was so well-written and well-executed that it lodged forever after in my consciousness.

My untutored but sensitive ears always pricked up, for example, at Hertz Rent a Car’s “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat” commercials, and years later I found out why. It turns out that they were written by Richard Adler, whose other credits include the scores for Damn Yankees and The Pajama Game, and sung by the Hi-Los, the hippest of all jazz vocal groups:

No less catchy was “The Disadvantages of You,” a wordless tune with a sexy south-of-the-border beat that was used to hawk Benson & Hedges cigarettes. It was the work of Mitch Adler, who later moved over to Broadway from Madison Avenue to compose Man of La Mancha:

But those Benson & Hedges commercials, lest we forget, were also funny. Indeed, the late Sixties and early Seventies were a great time for commercials that were not infrequently funnier than the sitcoms they interrupted. For sheer looniness, it’d be hard to beat this once-ubiquitous pair of ads:

The best of them were clever enough to be worthy of the talents of such legendary comedians as Bert Lahr:

Many were the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the ad agency whose Alka-Seltzer ads, in particular this exercise in postmodernism avant la lettre, are very likely the best-remembered commercials of the period:

Doyle Dane Bernbach also put Volkswagen on the map with its print and TV ads, of which this one, created by Roy Grace, is at least as familiar to my fellow baby boomers as “Spicy Meatball,” another of Grace’s one-minute gems:

What is most striking in retrospect about DDB’s commercials is their comic sophistication. They were fully as clever as the sketch comedy of such classic variety series as Your Show of Shows and The Carol Burnett Show. Stan Freberg’s commercials, by contrast, were equally ingenious but funny in a different, zanier way:

It was Freberg who wrote and directed what was at the time the most expensive sixty-second spot ever filmed, a mini-musical starring Ann Miller that, once seen, can never be forgotten:

Watching these commercials, it’s easy to see what my mother meant when she said, as she often did, “You know, the commercials are some of the best things on TV.” So they were, and I very much wish that she were alive to watch them again on YouTube. I suspect that they would fill her with the same affectionate nostalgia—and the same delight—that they now give me a half-century after the two of us first saw them together.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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