Kayaks and Counselors: An Ad Review

Here's some free advice to anyone who wants to use mental health for comedy: don't. At least, don't do it when the service you're offering is alleging to help people with mental heath issues. 

I understand completely what BetterHelp is trying to do. A similar ad from some years ago used those Nigerian Prince scams as its focus. A woman is sitting by herself on a bus when an elderly man sits down next to her to tell her he's going to give her part of his fortune if she cashes a check for him, all using slightly broken English befitting an email put through a bad translator. Naturally, the woman shakes her head and gets off at the next stop. The narrator chimes in, "You wouldn't take this offer in person, so why would you go along with it in an e-mail chain?" 

It's a rather on-the-nose way of saying, "This is how you sound when talking about X" or "This is how X looks to everyone else." A series of comedy skits on YouTube take a similar approach: 

As of this writing, BetterHelp has 3 ads using this formula. I'll try to link them where I can, but as far as I can tell, BetterHelp doesn't have a YouTube channel where they would keep all of these videos to be used in pre-roll ads. The one with the weightlifter is actually the most subtle. Two men are working out in a gym. One struggles with a bench press, unable to lift the bar off his chest. Another man offers a spot. He is blown off at first, to which he counters, "There's nothing wrong with asking for help." He is dismissed again with what sounds like a non sequitur, "You don't know my family." There's no hyperbole or absurdism here, at least not to the extent of the other ads in this campaign. In fact, if it weren't for the other ads, I'd call this a very effective public service announcement. 

The next ad in the campaign is more comical, though I have to admit it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. A woman sits on her couch in a living room. The lights go out, then flicker back on a moment later. The woman's roommate calls out how long this has been going on. Like with the weightlifter, she is dismissed. The lights go out again. When they flicker back on a moment later, the roommate is now standing in the living room door and asking again about getting the problem fixed. The dismissal this time is much like the one the weightlifter gave, a call to simply cope with the situation. The ad is essentially playing off horror movie tropes, of people disappearing and reappearing with lights going on and off. I hate to admit it got a chuckle out of me. Much like the weightlifter ad, it's subtle enough to serve as a public service announcement on how to identify a person going through mental health problems. That is, the shorter version of the ad is almost effective. There's a longer version of the ad involving a book case getting toppled during a blackout. 

The third ad goes off the rails completely into slapstick comedy. A cowboy with a bandaged foot limps along to his horse. Another cowboy offers help, noting how deadly rattlesnake bites can get. The first cowboy starts giving some speech about "how his daddy and his daddy before him" did something or other. There's no message or theme here that isn't buried under the formulaic comedy trope of walking through pain. When King Arthur's duel with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is more subtle than you, you have failed in whatever it was you were trying to convey. 

You haven't highlighted the weight of the problem. You've put it on stage and made a spectacle of it. 

Kayak went from making fun of cryptomnesia (unconscious appropriation) to labeling people who speak out against their business model as "Kayak Deniers." The political overtones of this should be obvious. The targets are chiefly climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and a few other conspiracy theories while it's at it. The ads focus on small family gatherings in which the "issue" of Kayak is brought up, at which point a verbal battle of words ensues, escalating to a shouting match before someone storms off, leaving everyone else rolling their eyes at the whole debacle. 

So, how can I defend one set of ads while another gets admonished for the same technique? Simply put, the melody is the same, but the instrumentation is different. Kayak is a travel planning service using socio-political tensions as a punchline. BetterHelp is an online/virtual counseling service using mental health as... well, it's not trying to make it sound like a punchline, but it definitely feels as though it's mocking it, or at least minimizing it. It makes me wonder who the ad is for exactly. If it's someone with mental health problems, it comes across as diminishing, painting them as a burden when that's precisely why they keep their issues bottled up in the first place. If it's someone else (i.e. the roommate, the spotter, etc.), it doesn't offer much insight into the problem, and certainly doesn't equip them on how to handle the situation. 

Don't Beg For Laughs

This is in response to recent events involving a DeviantART user named "CustomSaga" referring to a character-based interview journal on a roleplaying group as, "The sort of thing autistic people come up with." After being banned from the group for his remark, he proceeded to whine on his own journal about the issue, as well as a few other vaguely-substantiated straw men about the goings-on in the group. I called him out on his choice of words, and he proceeded to defend his right to say whatever he wanted and use whatever terminology he wanted as a point of criticism with no reproach whatsoever. He basically felt that his skepticism of the group's project was so compelling in and of itself, he could phrase it in a totally immature, insensitive, and inarticulate manner and it would not paint him as anything less than a civil critic inviting a mature discussion.  

During the torrent of backpedaling and "context mongering," if that's a term, the word "joke" came up toward the tail end of the discussion, used in such a manner as to imply he may well have had no sense of humor or any understanding of how telling jokes is supposed to work. 

The late George Carlin once said, "Even rape can be funny." and, in principle, I agree with that sentiment completely. If my saying that is making your blood boil or getting your head all-a-shakin' over it, I understand completely and don't blame you for it. However, I'd like you to read that sentence again, emphasizing the words "CAN" and "PRINCIPLE." As an artist, I believe that boundaries and rules are made to be pushed, bent, and even broken. This applies to comedy as well. It's not uncommon to see one comedian met with a standing ovation for the same reason another may get booed off stage for telling a similar joke. I've seen one comedian build an entire routine about the sorts of tactics terrorists should be using instead of bombings and hijackings, the audience eating out of his hand the entire time, while another cannot even get past his opening line of, "You know what I love about terrorists?" without the entire house calling for blood. 

Why one routine got cheers while another got jeers can generally be chalked up to luck and timing. Some crowds are a little more forgiving of having their buttons pushed than others, some subjects are best left to simmer a bit before the roasting can begin, and what separates a good comedian from a bad one is how they handle being dealt that bad hand. Stand-Up Comedy was once described by the late Mitch Hedburg as, "the noble profession of convincing a roomful of strangers that you're funny." going on to mention that you can't please everyone all the time. The fact is, barring any open mic night at a local gig, by the time you see a comedian perform on stage, they've gone through their routine dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of times before to a variety of crowds in a plethora of venues. During this time, jokes are either refined or dropped altogether. 

Sometimes, you tell a joke, and it doesn't go over well. Either people don't get it, or worse, they don't think it's funny. At this point, any good comedian knows that quite possibly the worst course of action to take is to defend the joke and insist on its brilliance and edginess. Sure, sometimes a quick quip or well-worded jab can bring an audience back from the edge of the Great Booing Chasm, but the general rule of thumb is that if the audience doesn't laugh the first time, it's because you didn't tell the joke right. As such, explaining it, defending it, and insisting on its merits will never win back that lost first laugh. Not only do those people get booed off stage, but their future in the profession is non-existent. 

There was a post on Facebook some time ago that illustrates this perfectly. It was a panel from a comic wherein iconic supersonic crime-fighter The Flash exposits the extent of his exceptional acceleration by describing occurrences that can only be observed in the space of an attosecond. The rest of the post explained exactly what an attosecond is. Informal definition: there are more attoseconds in the time it takes to say the word "attosecond" than there are grains of sand on all the earth's beaches. One of the comments to this post was, "Dude could rape a b---- and she wouldn't even know it!" 

As you might imagine, quite a few people were offended by this remark. I wasn't offended by it personally, per se, but that's not to knock everyone else who called him out on what he said as sexist and insensitive. They'd every right to be offended, though it seemed more people simply didn't find the joke funny. I thought, "Dude went for the low-hanging fruit. Whatever. Swing and a miss." and that could have been the end of it. Some people got mad, some people didn't laugh, a few clever folks satirically pointed out the logistics of such an event occurring (friction, combustion, and all that), and the joke was generally received as being in poor taste. 

Except that wasn't the end of it, because the idiot who laid that egg felt he was entitled to a laugh, and damned if he wasn't going to leave the discussion without changing at least one mind that his joke was the funniest thing in existence. The point is, him apologizing for the joke may have been unnecessary (courteous, but unnecessary), yet defending it and insisting himself beyond criticism for it puts him well beyond what even the sincerest apology would make amends for. I shouldn't have to explain the limitations of freedom of speech any more than I should have to explain how unrealistic and downright naive it is to insist every joke told receive the same equally positive reaction. 

You bombed. 

Move on.