13 responses so far ↓

• 1 Miko // May 1, 2007 at 4:55 pm

  I actually like the one with the kids, but I agree: this generation of three ads is pretty terrible. I guess I’m glad these are the last, but damn he’s hot!

• 2 Elaine Frei // May 1, 2007 at 4:57 pm

  Thanks for pointing this one out, John. I might just have to write a letter to someone about this ad.

  My honest opinion? It isn’t so much that this series of ads has jumped the shark. It’s that this ad is just plain offensive. Why would they ever think that I would buy a Mac over a PC after they’ve made fun of fat people? They wouldn’t dream of doing the same thing with the PC represented by an African American or an Hispanic or an Asian or a gay person. Why, why, why do they think it’s okay to use the image of a fat person to represnt the bad, the outdated, the unacceptable?

  *Sigh*

• 3 John // May 1, 2007 at 8:33 pm

  Elaine, I think you articulated some of my unease with this ad. I didn’t find it funny at all, and now I can see how many would find it downright offensive.

• 4 cbiden // May 1, 2007 at 9:48 pm

  Yup. Definitely jumped the sharp. Well, the others were good.

• 5 nee // May 2, 2007 at 8:42 pm

  I wasn’t offended by it. I didn’t find it funny. I didn’t find the one with all the guys on the cart funny either.

  My favorite of this ilk are the parodies which I found linked on John Dehlin’s blog for Christian vs. Christ follower.

• 6 Elaine Frei // May 3, 2007 at 6:15 am

  Well, perhaps I’m too sensitive about this issue. However, my feeling is that things like this ad encourage people to do things like walk up to someone they don’t know at all and say cruel or downright mean things to them simply because they don’t happen to be a size six or whatever. Like the time I had some guy - I’d never seen him before in my life - walk up to me and tell me that I should just kill myself because I’m too fat and ugly to be seen in public. Talk about the moral equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

  I know that a lot of people see “fat jokes”, which is really what this ad is, as harmless and that maybe those of us who are fat set ourselves up for them. After all, their reasoning goes (and I’ve had this articulated to me on a number of occasions), I could lose weight if I really wanted to, which would eliminate the problem at least in my case. But my position is that my weight, which is at least partly due to a medically confirmed burp in my metabolism (that cheeseburger I ate when I met John and Jana for lunch a couple of weeks ago notwithstanding, my diet is in general pretty healthy), is far less my choice than anyone’s religion is. But we would not stand for someone going up to an individual of any particular religion and saying horrible things to them based on that. Look what happened to Mel Gibson when he pulled that stunt a while back. My suspicion is that nobody would have had anything to say about it at all if he had verbally attacked a fat person, or fat people in general.

• 7 nee // May 3, 2007 at 1:20 pm

  I’m fat. It’s not due to a metabolism anomaly and it’s something I’m working on and finally succeeding long term at. (yay!). However, I’m sensitive that it something that people can and do attack without regard. Personally, I think that’s becoming less so because if we’re not already there, we’re rapidly close to overweight/obesity becoming the majority of society. You can thank the food industry for that. The cheapest and most convenient foods (and I don’t just mean fast food) are nutritionally garbage.

  I didn’t see the ad as being an attack on fat people. I see these commercials as representing 2 brands of computers. Hodgeman’s portrayal didn’t even click in my head as a fat person, more like a something unreal, like when the obnoxious relative in the Harry Potter movie who keeps getting bigger and bigger like a balloon and floats away. My first thought in watching it was the 2 hours I spent uninstalling programs that came with my parents’ Dell pc they bought last year. It was unreal - loaded to comical proportions with junk.

  I don’t think anyone can tell someone else not to be offended by something. Everything is based on our own perspective which is shaped by our experiences. It is good to share our different observations of the ad here to glimpse others’ frame of reference.

• 8 John // May 3, 2007 at 7:54 pm

  Elaine, what a scumbag that guy was! I’m fuming just thinking about it…
  I agree with Elaine that Americans have an insensitivity towards size that would be unforgivable if directed towards race, ethnicity or gender. At the same time, I don’t think it’s quite the same. It’s entirely appropriate for a doctor to advise an obese patient to lose weight as part of a health regimen. I’m not sure where to draw the lines for this.

  I didn’t find this ad funny at all (and I love most of them), but I didn’t find it offensive. Maybe this is a sign of my own cultural insensitivity. Maybe Hodgman’s suit will be equated with blackface in a decade or three. If nothing else, I am going to try to be more alert in the future.

• 9 Elaine Frei // May 6, 2007 at 8:43 pm

  You’re quite right, John, that in the context of a doctor-patient relationship the lines regarding the subject of size/weight are different than those in everyday discourse. Unfortunately, even some doctors don’t know how to approach the subject without being judgemental about it. Others, thankfully, understand that not everyone who is fat is that way just becuase they don’t know when to stop eating.

  Anyway…lines. That is, indeed a hard thing to know in a lot of circumstances, including the weight issue. I’ll tell you one thing that is over the line, though…if one walks up to a complete stranger in a restaurant, looks at their plate, and says “Are you sure you should be eating that?”, they’ve crossed the line. And yes, that’s happened to me before.

• 10 Matt Thurston // May 7, 2007 at 11:28 am

  The guy who plays “PC” recently did a very, very funny segment on NPR’s This American Life podcast. Track it down if you can. The topic of the podcast episode had something to do with “jobs” or “great jobs” or “unusual jobs.”

• 11 John White // May 7, 2007 at 1:12 pm

  Hodgeman is a regular on TAL. Even before the Apple ad fame, I believe.

• 12 Shana // May 8, 2007 at 10:15 am

  I did not see him as “Fat”, rather I saw him as bloated and encumbered. And since I own a PC that did come loaded up with lots of useless software, I totally related to the commercial.

• 13 Sereth // May 12, 2007 at 8:38 pm

  FACT ALERT.

  The term ‘Jump the Shark’ has officially jumped the shark.

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