Insurance Divorces Comedy

Insurance commercials are successful only on the merit that it is unwise to live without the service they provide.

Insurance commercials are not successful because they are funny. And it's apparently obvious that they don't have to be.

I'm not directing anything at Travelers, State Farm, or All-State. They all have pretty solid ad campaigns. They don't exactly try to be funny, and that's fine. They're at least somewhat clever.

I'm calling out Geico and Progressive.

They have shitty ad campaigns.

And by "shitty" I mean "pretty shitty," and by "pretty shitty," I of course mean any of the following equivalents from this laundry list of phrases:



God awful
Well below mediocrity
Intellectually challenged
Comedically adverse (don't really care if 'comedically' is not a word)
Informatively perverse
A serious waste of time
Non-sensical
Stupid
Embecilic
Lame
Makes me want to drown a puppy in a murky river, revive it, and then drown it again
and
Absolutely, positively, not funny


Most (right around 97% of) their insurance commercials are almost painfully unfunny.

Here's the problem:

You're trying to make me fall in love with a British gecko that constantly reminds us of his surroundings. When one commercial sucks, you come out with three more. Why do you do that? If your company had a soul at any level of management, then you would stop beating us in the face with your schlong-sized gecko. It's just another mushroom stamp that our society does not want to deal with.

And it's not like we can easily avoid it, because nearly every single sports broadcast outside of cycling seems to carry Geico as a sponsor. And it makes a dude wonder, just how do they continue to achieve the funding for these 'worse than Sinbad's career' commercials?

Then there's Progressive...

The only thing that's progressive about these commercials is that they are progressively getting shittier. One heaping pile of shit to another heaping pile of shit, all scripted, rehearsed, and then recorded on camera.

Progressive is going for the 'almost funny' and 'almost obnoxious' angle, and is coming off as the foul-breathed redheaded Girl Scout that won't stop bugging you to buy thin mints during every fundraising cycle. No matter how good the thin mints actually are, you're eventually going to not want to have anything to do with them if an annoying Wendy Thomas stunt double continues to incessantly ring your doorbell trying to sell them to you. Just like the ad firms working for Progressive, she just doesn't have any idea how annoying she actually is. And she definitely has no idea her breath is so foul.

I'm really sorry that I had to lash out toward the Ginger community, but I needed to stoop that low just so I could convey my point. Not the point that Gingers are annoying, but the point that Progressive insurance commercials are insufferable. Insufferable to the intensity that I can almost guarantee that somewhere in this country, there is a tight-knit group of people conspiring to assassinate Flo. Putting her out of her misery would more than likely put us out of ours.

I'm really sorry that I had to lash out toward Stephanie Courtney (the woman whom portrays Flo), but I needed to stoop that low just so I could convey my point. Not the point that having two first names is annoying, but the point that Progressive insurance commercials are without a doubt, insufferable.