Pistols and a 2009 Superbowl Doritos Ad: The Perfect Storm

If there's one thing people value in both jokes and ads, it's originality. So today, when you're watching what advertisers call "The Big Game," because the term "The Super Bowl" is trademarked or copyrighted or whatever and can only be used with hefty licensing fees, make sure to say, "Sometimes, the commercials are better than the game!" because no one in the history of time has ever said that before, you effing Oscar Wilde.

Your witty repartee thus established for the evening, let's turn to an ad for All That Is Good And True In This World: Doritos.



This ad, which I suppose we should call "The Power of Crunch," since "Backdoor Vixens #8" is already taken by a very popular (with me) DVD series - starts off with a fairly plausible thesis: that Doritos are crunchy enough to have magical/sonic force level powers.

Naturally, our male protagonist's first use of this power (as it inevitably was in every single movie in the 1980s where a male gained magical powers, be it Zapped!, Zapped Again, or School Spirit) is to rip the clothes off of an attractive woman, leaving her in her incredibly ornate underthings.

(Note: if these movies and fantasy scenes are to be believed, women always wear a matching set of sexy-yet-not-actually-that-revealing bra and panties, as well as stockings and a garter belt. Having lived with women upon whom I used my magical powers (read: roofies) to undress them regularly, I can say that this is, unfortunately, not always the case.)

Somehow, our hero decides to not just use this version of the power and disrobe every semi-attractive woman around (showing the director's disdain for realism), and instead aims the crunch power of Doritos at an ATM. While this is an apparently easy way to earn extra money to buy more Doritos, it does raise the important question: how do we ensure that terrorists never learn of the explosive crunch power of Doritos? Sure, I do my part by eating four bags a week, but I'm only one man (unless you weigh me, in which case, I'm technically two).

As money pours out of the ATM, a man who appears to be a stripper dressed as a police officer gets out of his cop car to restore order. "Not so fast," our anarchic, devil-may-care protagonist says (via his actions, the way a real man "speaks"), biting a chip in Johnny Law's direction.

Naturally, instead of knocking his clothes off, as it did to the attractive woman just eight seconds ago, it turns the cop into a capuchin monkey (easily one of the four funniest monkeys one can be turned into), because Doritos inherently know that the male body is hideous and should never be seen unclothed, and adjust their crunch power accordingly from "extremely localized gale-force winds" to "transmogrification."

Then, as if all this weren't enough, the protagonist gets hit by a bus.

So, in short, if you buy Doritos, you will gain magical powers that will enable you to kind of see parts of the breasts of attractive women, destroy our financial systems via attacks on innocent ATMs, and mock the efforts of law enforcement to reign in your crunch-based Reign of Terror. And yet still, you will be brought low by the oldest trick in the "we need an allegedly funny end to our ad, and we've got 1.7 seconds to do it in" book: cheap physical humor.

It's really a metaphor for life.