The blurring of reality

And now, the story of three commercials.

Commercial, the first

You remember the Snuggie. Blanket with sleeves, all that jazz. The first version of it, the Slanket (ugh), came out in 1998. That’s right, the Snuggie is old enough to vote. The ads went viral in the 2008 range, but it took me multiple years before I actually realized it was a real thing. Do you remember the first commercial?

I was sure, sure, for a long time that this was an elaborate Saturday Night Live bit that no one was admitting to. It’s like … okay, you guys remember the dress, right? Blue and black, white and gold? (The answer was blue and black, y’all are crazy.) Okay, so the day of the dress was the day I broke up with my last girlfriend I dated before I got together with my wife. It was a very necessary breakup, one that I didn’t actually feel bad about because it wasn’t nice to keep dating someone I didn’t love but who did love me. That said, she was also the only person I ever dumped, and I felt like a jerk. I don’t like feeling like a jerk. So I’m sitting around, hanging out with my brother and his family, scrolling through my phone, feeling like a jerk, and there’s this Buzzfeed article about this dress that is confusing people. Buzzfeed says people think it’s white and gold and other people think it’s blue and black. And I’m reading it, absolutely without a doubt sure this was a joke that I wasn’t getting. Buzzfeed is just being absurdist, it happens.

But then there was a poll at the end, and I clicked that it was black and blue, because it was obviously black and blue. It just was. But then the poll results came up, and there were so many white and gold votes. So many. This absurdist humor was lost on me.

So I showed it to my brother. “What color is this dress?” He looked, then looked at me like I was weird, then said “it’s white and gold, why?”

So everybody was in on the joke. That was the case. This was a damn Magic Eye all over again, the whole world had gotten together to play a very weird, absurdist joke on Daniel, and I couldn’t figure out why.

That was the Snuggie. I didn’t believe it was a real product for a long time. I have since bought one (a gag gift for a former manager), and yet to this day if it came out that it was actually Amy Poehler or Kenan Thompson or Andy Samberg in that ad and it was just a viral joke, I wouldn’t be that surprised.

Commercial, the second

Y’all ever had a Neck Basket?

So it took a few times of watching that ad for me to remember that it would end with a “Haha, that’s not real, but wouldn’t that be crazy?” Because … like, I don’t want a Neck Basket, I wouldn’t use a Neck Basket, the clearly think the Neck Basket XL is silly. But man, the product in general? It doesn’t strike me as that crazy. Climbing a ladder to, I don’t know, install a ceiling fan? The Neck Basket would be great! Stashing extra spices while you’re cooking? Cool! This ad was made to show you how stupid weird products can be, and there’s more than a small part of me that wants this product. I don’t know what to make of that, but it’s true.

Commercial, the third

I’m still not altogether sure if this is real.

GYM1 Indoor Playground. Basically the chin-up par that college dudes get, plus, like, a rope. Or a swing. That’s the entire product. It costs almost $200. How can that be real? I don’t understand! I mean, I still have one of those chin-up bars somewhere. It cost me like 20 bucks. I can get a rope. I could build a GYM1 for like $40, all-in.

But this ad appears to be real. You go to their website, and there’s even the automated tech support “Do you have questions?” chat popping up. It must be real!

But then what the hell is this???

Who is the monkey? Doesn’t a motorcycle weight several hundred pounds, even a dirt bike a couple hundred? Who is this gentleman who appears nowhere else in this advertisement?

So here’s where we are. Three advertisements — one for a real product that I would swear is fake, one for a fake product that I would totally accept as real, and one for (I guess?) a real product that can’t possibly actually be real. I have no other point to make here. I just don’t understand how these ads and these products come into existence.

Really, I just want to know about the monkey.