The Commercial Drinking Game!

Last night, North Carolina beat up on Louisville en route to the Final Four. Always looking to help out my team, I somehow rationalized that being a good Tar Heel meant getting drunk during the game. My roommates and I drafted up some rules: Drink for a second for each point we score, drink every time Tyler Hansbrough looks like he's had a lobotomy, and so forth:


Anyway, this proved to be a terrific game for the four minutes; we were already drunk thanks to Psycho T McMurphy. But then something terrible happened... they went to commercial.

Uh oh. Now we're sitting there soberly listening to Sally Field talk about osteoperosis. Not good.

Solution? Let's make a commercial drinking game! Here are some rules I thought up. Feel free to suggest your own in the comments.

Drink every time a well dressed, light-skinned minority is shown doing something positive
Diversity's all the rage these days (it's the new black, if I may), and advertisers are sure to do their part, showing sharply dressed, attractive twenty-something minorities enjoying Mcdonalds and having perfect teeth, or something like that. But not just any minorities will do; they've gotta be non-threatening, white-friendly minorities, of course! Because of this, they're often as close to white as possible while still maintaining their minority status (Just think about how many commercials Tiger Woods stars in... had Davidson made it to the Final Four, I'm pretty sure Stephen Curry could have a career as a commercial actor).

As for the "doing something positive" part, this is what I like to call the Anti-Buckwheat. Since advertising execs know they can't portray minorities doing something negative (It's racist), these minorities are always cheery and fun and doing something great! They get inexplicable pleasure out of being customer service representatives, having life insurance or driving Volkswagens. Drink when you see 'em. By the way, I was always a fan of another kind of Anti-Buckwheat, namely Harry White, the hilariously dorky white kid on Nickelodeon's short-lived My Brother and Me:



Drink every time there's a caveman (Courtesy of Andy Tompkins):
Seriously, what's with all the cavemen? Commercials used to have monkeys in suits, now they have cavemen. Go figure. And be sure to drink when you're not busy figuring.

Drink when American car companies advertise without actually saying anything objective about their vehicles' performance/Drink when Japanese car commercials demonstrate the statistical, irrefutable greatness of their products
Chevrolet meeting:
"Our cars blow. Our trucks blow. How can we sell them?"
"America?"
"Fuck yeah."
"Ok, I got it. Let's get some shots of Martin Luther King, Jr. [see above], some soldiers, the World Trade Center and baseball."
"Hold on, hold on. We need some background tunes."
"Born in the U.S.A.?"
"Nah, I think education and the Internet have started cueing people on to the fact that that's not actually promoting Old Glory."
"OOOOH OOOOH PICK ME!"
"Yeah?"
"JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP!"
"Meeting adjourned."

Toyota meeting (as translated by me):
"Ummmm... Maybe we can drive one to the edge of a cliff because our breaks kick ass?"
"Sweet. What else?"
"Let's drop a truck from really high up, and then have another one drive really fast to show that we're even better than gravity!."
"YES. Meeting adjourned."

Ford meeting:
"Arright guys, we all know that the Japanese make better cars, but now Toyota's actually showing it through commercials??? WHAT DO WE DO?!"
"Let's tie an F-150 to one of those NASA centrifuges and spin it around!"
"One problem: That doesn't prove anything."
"Uhhhhhhh.... Space?"
"I'm sold. Meeting adjourned."

Drink every time you see a commercial for whatever you're drinking
I guess this one's because I'm a huge fan of everything self-referential. I mean c'mon, I blogged about blog. Whoa. Plus I've been researching the fourth dimension (it's there, ya damn naysayers), so I see this as having some deep, trippy Lewis Carrollian implications, which'll totally add to your buzz if you think hard enough about them.

Drink whenever products are advertised for geriatric people
You're drinking during the Price Is Right, which is totally awesome. Keep at it, it's almost noon.