Barbara Lippert's Critique

At the time of Richard Nixon's resignation, comedians joked about his future. They pictured him in California, wearing a suit on the beach and combing the sand with his metal detector.Now word is Bill Clinton, when not traveling and speaking in Asia and South Africa, has spent some evenings in a bar in Chappaqua, knocking back nonalcoholic beers and chatting with strangers. Imagine, on one of those Chappaqua nights, if Bubba was introduced to Mike's Hard Lemonade. Oh the liquored-up stories he could tell. To me, hard lemonade sounds like an oxymoron, but that's just because I don't frequent bars. "Alternabevs,'' such as Mike's, Rick's Spike Lemonade and Hooper's Hooch, are huge. Fruity or sweet, they're also called "alcopops'' and "malternatives.'' In reality, they contain the same malt base and about the same alcohol level (5 percent) as mass-market brews.Not surprisingly, the ad rules are actually tougher for this malternative universe. There are regulatory concerns that these brands will try to outwit restrictions on liquor commercials. More to the point, the fear is these candy-sweet drinks inherently appeal to underage drinkers. Perhaps as a result, these brands have unleashed an extreme sort of advertising, picking up where the late dot-coms left off. And what agency is better at getting attention for Mike's than Cliff Freeman and Partners, home of the cannon-fired gerbils for Outpost.com? These spots are sweeter; the grotesque violence is directed at the lemonade drinkers, who don't miss a step or a sip, despite the self-immolation. All three ads send up the hoary myth that "boys don't cry,'' while proving what a little hard lemonade can do at the end of the day. In the first spot, a construction worker, having fallen 20 stories, proudly comes to the bar with a steel girder through his chest. (His buddy opens the bottle top with it.) In the second, a lumberjack chops off his foot ("My wife just bought me them boots yesterday," he laments.) A guy feeding a porpoise in the third gets his hand bitten off. Because the spots are so aggressively and unabashedly dumb, fake and deadpan, however, they're not offensive. "A hard day calls for a hard lemonade. Make it Mike's,'' says the announcer at the end of each spot. The joke is on the myth of being a hard man who can take anything—and that a night of drinking can repair even missing limbs.Indeed, the ads are attention-getting and childish in a pre-Tom Green way. Nobody is eating a mouse or sucking a cow's udder—and we are grateful for that. They are more Monty Pythonesque—as in the scene in The Holy Grail in which two guys are dueling and one ends up without limbs, just a fighting stump. "What are you going to do, bleed on me?'' the other guy asks. Meanwhile, the stump keeps heckling him. It's unbelievably broad, sunny, slapstick humor. It's stupid but not mean-spirited. And that's in extreme contrast to many other beer spots, which seem to be appealing to a new generation of alcoholic misogynists.Bud Light, for example, has hit bottom with its portrayal of a slob throwing pencils at the ceiling. A sexy-voiced woman calls him, telling him to come home. He doesn't move. But when she mentions she has beer, he gets so excited, he lobs another pencil and it tears right though the ceiling, a chair and into the rectum (what fun!) of the guy above him. A Michelob light ad is similarly bad. It shows an attractive woman preparing a lavish dinner for her boyfriend. He shows up, a total scuz, who couldn't care less until he spies the beer. So let's hear it for the few, the impaled, the limbless. At least, as with Bill, they still like women.

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Barbara Lippert's Critique

Barbara Lippert

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Barbara Lippert