Humorous ads work best by steering clear of weighty themes and dense references and sticking instead to breezy treatment of pop culture. Space is everything in such ads. Humour needs some room to breathe. Pack too much in, and you end up with the new campaign for Pat the Baker.
Made by Mindmap Communications, it keeps things at the level of pop culture but packs so many arch and self-conscious references into a small space that it leaves precious little room for laughs.
The campaign’s main ad, featuring Jon Kenny, majors on the whacky, pitching the Pat the Baker range, some might say improbably, as a yoof product. It combines a Mrs Doubtfire doppelganger with a take on Pinocchio, leavening the mix with a Roman centurion.
Kenny’s Doubtfire character doffs her metaphorical hat at a Vodafone ad that featured Pat Shortt, who was Kenny’s partner in D’Unbelievables, in a cross-dressing role. She directs her ire at her mulletted son, Seanin George (also played by Kenny) who, lying that he hasn’t stolen some sandwiches, morphs into a teenage Pinocchio, his nose growing longer as he speaks, in an ad that tries just a bit too hard.
The second ad currently in transmission, The American, again intended primarily for young viewers, is less convoluted. Seanin George, this time replete with standard baseball cap, returns home from a weekend in America, transformed into a pseudo rap artist. A victim of mall fashion, he has changed, but according to the voiceover, “at least some things never” do.
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Low-brow cartoons bursting with unsubtle gags, the campaign is saved by the range of Kenny’s multiple performances, which makes perfect use of the mock stage Irish script. The ads promise much and deliver more. But when humour is the goal, less is almost always more.