Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Nerve’s 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time

49. "Levitol," MADtv, 2006



The "ask your doctor if *blank* is right for you" genre has been sent up a thousand times, but a few stand out, this one for its initial realism and subsequent devolution into madness. The weird doctor-patient power dynamic hasn't been made any more comfortable by the raft of TV ads encouraging us to ask about particular medicines, a fact that this parody nails perfectly. And there's just something about those gardening gloves — are we wrong in thinking this wouldn't work without them?