Edmonton-based radio stations Sonic 102.9 and The Bounce are currently airing TV ads which mashed together songs they play. The former was alright and actually fit well, mashing together Feel Good Inc, Under the Bridge, Uprising and Somebody Told Me. The latter was hilariously awful and mashed together E.T., We R Who We R, Born this Way, Hello and others. None of the choices fit together and it was only nothing more than just hilarious.
Anna Blue, a CGI girl who sings a song called "So Alone" in a Jamster commercial. The repeated mirror throwing, mixed with the over-dramatic, stereotypical Emobehavior makes the song hardly anything to take seriously.
As if the emo appeal weren't cheesy enough, Jamster took the liberty of making a second song called "Your Heart," sung by a Twilight-esque CGI vampire guy named Damien Dawn. Not only does it use the same Stock Footage from "So Alone," but it also adds its own cheesy clips. Like Damien climbing up and singing on Anna's roof, and him jumping in the moonlight.
The TV ad for Cirque Du Soleil's winter production Wintuk has this narration:
This is the magic of Wintuk. This is the thrill of Wintuk. This is the season of Wintuk! ...Don't miss the final season of this wonderful, winterful show that New York Times calls "a family oriented holiday extravaganza"!
In 2009, an Alberta based carpeting company called End of the Roll issued a series of ads with images of people buying carpets, laying down carpets, people smiling over their carpets and what not. The song in the background? "The Look" by Roxette. Furthermore the ads having the over-excited narrator saying "Give your house... THE LOOK!!!!" followed by "Na na na na na, she's got the look..." just heightened the narm up to 11.
Almost every American anti-drug PSA. Worth special mention is an abovetheinfluence.org ad in which a girl's dog tells her to stop smoking marijuana. Left unsaid was that if your dog is talking to you, then you have bigger problems than marijuana. Like like the powerful hallucinogen you obviously took.
They didn't mean to say it did -- the dog also appears in the final shot flying the abovetheinfluence.org flag. (If your hallucinations disapprove of your drug use, you have a problem.) They only wanted to say that marijuana makes you so uncool that your dog will reject you. But it was a non-anthropomorphic dog who does nothing in the body of the ad but disapprove of marijuana -- and all the dialogue is written, not spoken. The whole thing is surreal.
Made worse when a live action version of this ad began airing.
In 2007 and 2008, there was a very odd anti-drug PSA from abovetheinfluence.org in which a girl dumped her pot-smoking boyfriend for an Alien after it declined his joint. That was the message of the PSA: If you smoke pot, an alien will steal your girlfriend. Tres Bizarre. That it was all drawn with magic marker probably didn't help. The most hilarious part was that the pot smoker sees an alien land, and what's the first thing he does? He offers the alien a joint, of course.
Given some of the jokes other druggies tell about potheads...
The guys smoking pot and circling through a drive-thru at a restaurant four times while a girl on a bicycle rides by; at the end, the producers pull a Bolivian Army Ending and imply she got hit. Memorably parodied on Chappelle's Show:
This was part of a larger campaign. Another ad culminated with one of two high kids accidentally shooting the other with his dad's loaded gun. Unfortunately, Politically Incorrect and TV Guide pointed out that maybe the real problem here was that an easily accessible loaded gun was in the house!
In one infamous anti-drug PSA, a solemn tone is set as we go into a darkened room with a shadowed figure sitting in the center. The lights come up and reveal...Pee-wee Herman. Not Paul Reubens, Pee-wee Herman. Who proceeds to pull out a vial of crack and solemnly tell us about the dangers of crack. In the Pee-Wee Herman voice, but with a dead serious tone. Words cannot describe how incredibly surreal this is, so we'll let the the ad speak for itself.
In another anti-drug PSA, starring Henry Rollins, he compares the feeling of using meth or speed (they're closely related) to driving a powerful car very fast. The car in the ad explodes.
"The difference? You can't rebuild a human heart."
His voice also cracks as he says this, adding to the narm.
And here's this PSA with some good ol' concrete diving.
The granddaddy was the fried egg "This is your brain on drugs" spot, which was the endless subject of parody for sketch comics from the mid-80s well into the 1990s.
"This is your asshole before prison, this is your asshole after prison..."
"This is your brain on drugs with a side order of bacon."
"I've fallen and I can't get up!" — originally supposed to be a shocking opening line in an ad for "Life Alert" ads depicting a helpless elderly woman who had fallen from her wheelchair, it quickly descended into farce. There were even T-shirts once. Life Alert now has the phrase trademarked, and it appears at the bottom of some ads.
Then there's the scene where an elderly woman is lying on the floor and trying to reach a phone that's sitting on a desk a few feet away -- sort of. She doesn't try to move towards it; she just reaches for it as if she believes that she can make her arm stretch the rest of the way.
Seniors can be so weak or weakened from a fall that they can't even move. Maybe she had osteoporosis and that fall caused a shattered bone or two. The ad still has Narm, mind you, but this happens more than young people think. (There are these lovely inventions called "cell phones" that even seniors can use...if they're prescient enough to be carrying them at home at the moment they fall.)
This video on the quite serious effects of drowsy driving has its impact (no pun intended) taken away at the end of the video...
A PSA about the example parents set for their kids had this unfortunate effect. The video showed children copying their parents (almost) exact actions right alongside them: the Narm takes over when some of the examples include a young girl smoking, a young boy throwing rocks at the neighbor's dog, a five-year old flipping off a driver, and a little boy helping batter his mother. The tagline "Children See, Children Do" didn't help.
The ad for the movie One Missed Call is unintentionally hilarious, with an ominous announcer voice saying, "When your call goes straight to voicemail, your world goes straight to Hell." Bonus points for the victim saying "That's not my ringtone" in a terrified almost-whisper. With skill, it's possible to make nearly anything scary; but it seems cell phones are a rare exception.
The ad for the movie The Darkest Hour, Holiday Mode! Watching something unrelated, just seeing the super-serious "Survive (beat) The Holidays" and seeing the dog disintigrate, was just hilarious.
If it was ever literally about fast food, it's also a Broken Aesop; a recent ad had Jason and Xander (fully suited; sorry, no return of Austin St. John) at McDonald's.
This becomes even more mind boggling when you realize that back in the 90's, they promoted fast food in both, the show and for McDonald's.
A British PSA about seatbelts was dropped when market research showed that audiences found the ending (in which a pizza splatters against a car windscreen in imitation of a human body) funny rather than shocking.
This editor was involved in a Scare'Em Straight production during high school which mimicked a real drunk driving accident in varying levels of detail. A movie was also made so that students who didn't see the actual crash scene could still get the gist of it - unfortunately, it opened with a line from this editor, playing the drunk driver, about getting drunk on wine. People invariably laugh at the idea of a sixteen-year-old getting into a drunk driving accident because he ditched school to sip a bottle of Cabernet, and the opening line ruined the tenor of the movie. (The line was recorded as a joke along with the "real" dialog, but the editors who worked on the video threw it in anyway.)
Call Liberty Medical and ask them about your DAHH'BEETUS. This message brought to you by Wilford Brimley (a.k.a. the "Quaker Oats" guy).
"Ah haet prickin mah fingahs! With Liberty Meter, it's much less painful. And it even talks to me."
Which is ridiculous because testing one's blood sugar levels via any regular meter that's been introduced to the market since 2000 has become so refined that it requires one tiny little finger prick that you barely feel. The insulin jab hurts a heck of a lot more. Granted, the hospital meters still require the old fashioned ginormous pricks that would hurt, but....
Or how about the poorly acted commercials for those "free" diabetic cookbooks? ("Free" is in quotation marks since there's always a catch to these things.) Poor Nicole Johnson tries her hardest, but puts across a creepy Sandra Lee kind of vibe, and the black woman sasses it up so much that it's almost worthy of giving the NAACP a conniption.
Multiple House Alarm commercials that play out pretend scenarios where a burglar, rapist, etc. would be scared away by the alarm. These scenarios, however, were frequently farfetched and downright funny
One involves two burglars attempting to break into a house in the middle of the day by loudly breaking a window with a crowbar because they spotted overgrown grass and multiple newspapers in the porch. It turns out a single mother with her children were all in the laundry room (why they let the grass over-grow and didn't pick up the paper for days on end is a mystery), but they were gladly protected by the incredible threat of a loud noise.
A more ridiculous scenario involves a single woman coming back to her (two-story, full-sized, middle-class) house from a date, only to have another man spy on them. Immediately after the man on a date left, the spying man runs up to the house and kicks open the door in the most obnoxious and over-dramatic way, setting off the alarm that baffles him and causes him to run away. The kicker? The woman gets a call from the alarm system technicians to ask what's wrong, and she says her ex-boyfriend knocked down the door.
A third commercial of equal ridiculous nature involves a burglar breaking open a front door in the middle of the night in the most obnoxious and loudest way possible, then acts surprised before running away because of a house alarm. Narm moment indeed.
There's also "this" Broadview Security ad, where the man breaking in looks straight at the woman before punching through her window (which sets off the alarm), lets her run upstairs, and then runs away. It's even more narm-y and ridiculous because the commercial made it clear that he'd just been to this woman's house while she was having a party (probably casing the joint, as neither the woman nor her friends seemed to know who he was) - he could have easily gotten in with a lie about leaving his keys or wallet behind and then incapacitated the woman. Instead he seems to think that if he waits fifteen minutes she'll magically be gone from her own home and manages to miss the security keypad next to the front door.
Yeah, protip, guys, if a guy breaks into your house after he sees you there, he is probably not going to be scared by an alarm (and might have already figured out how to disable it). A burglar who planned on robbing an empty house and having plenty of time to get away is much more likely to be scared by an alarm than an obvious intended murderer and probably wouldn't have tried to get in once they saw the sign - but property thieves who run away before trying to get into the house aren't as scary as intended murderers, so the companies show the alarm as being something magical that will keep all harm from entering your house.
Oxfam's (a UK aid charity) current TV campaign, called "Be Humankind". Apparently, you can defeat poverty (depicted as a giant monster) with halitosis!
London South Bank University has a poster campaign involving people with giant brains for heads.
"It Only Takes a Second", a video campaign by the Federated Mutual Insurance Company, depicts unfortunate and painful accidents through dramatization. What makes this safety video so narmy is that many of the situations are poorly acted and sometimes unrealistic. The final scene of the video is a good example of this.
"Our world is under constant attack". The start of a trailer for Mega Disasters on the History Channel's UK version.
In the 1980s, video games were given some narmful adverts. For instance, every commercial for an Atari 2600 video game, ever.
A Castlevania II ad had a random blonde with mega-shoulder pads shirt and big hair, and a guy in a cheap Dracula costume with stiff, almost zombie-like poses weird faces, standing in dry ice and tombstones that were obviously pieces of styrofoam painted gray.
The ad for the horror film Mirrors had a scene at the end that features Kiefer Sutherland sitting in a car saying, "mirrors are everywhere." Then he looks at the rearview mirror, sees a monster in it, lets out the most narmy yells, and dramatically flinches away from the mirror.
At least they're representing it correctly. The entire film is like that, with the absolute peak coming from his vision of a burning woman in a large ceiling-to-floor mirror, and his then being afflicted with this condition himself. Nearly a minute is devoted to just him writhing on the floor yelling, "THE FIRE! IT BURNS! AAAAAHHHHHH!"
Put to death by Alta, who took that video down for copyright infringement.
This driver's-ed video. It should speak for itself.
Have you been injured at home or at work in the last 4 years and it wasn't your fault? You could claim money. This line is normally given after a poorly acted reconstruction, though it sometimes is used on screens which should have people suing the law firms for causing epilepsy.
This ad againstdigital piracy embodies this trope for the Spanish-speaking cinema audiences. Even worse in some dubbed version where they add dramatic music...
There's an "Immigration rap" where two guys rap about how to become a U.S. citizen. The best part is probably "Are-you-a drug dee-al-er?" Who says yes!?
In Canada, there was a series of well-made ads with relatively high production values about the hazards of unsafe driving. The impact (pun intended) came from people not expecting to see the impact; while we don't from inside the car, we do get to see a Mack truck make hash out of one half of the little midsize car. The following ads show the aftermath: physical therapy (for the girlfriend of the driver), a funeral (for the driver's little brother), a trial for the driver of the car... All chilling. Then someone noticed that the guy playing the driver is the Villain Protagonist from an older commercial about how to avoid having your car stolen, and people started asking if the car that got smashed was the same one he stole.
The Magic Bullet To Go infomercial. While the first had the distinction of colourful, wacky characters congregating over a small machine after a party the previous night, it didn't have Dino. Dino makes his first appearance in the To Go infomercial, and the actor playing him is so bad that it makes every line top-grade Narm fuel. Just check out the way he says "Whoa! That is magic." at 3:49.
This book ad from Jack Chick's homepage. Forget being ex-gay; this guy's an ex-Cthulhu-worshipping ex-vampire!
"I needed blood! While other sinful men craved women’s bodies, I was only interested in their necks or femoral arteries"
This anti-global-warming PSA from Quercus, a Portuguese environmentalist group. It starts out visually striking with the shots of desolate wastelands and melting ice-caps; then the monkey hangs itself, and it runs shrieking into Narm territory. The CGI lip-quivering should have been a warning. And that was with the original sad piano score. The second version backed by Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" is even worse.
This old British PSA from the late 1970s that warned children not to play in electrical substations could either be considered hilariously Narmy or pure horror.
A fairly well-known healthcare system in metropolitan Detroit has, as of late, become known not for the quality of their medical services, but for their horribly over-the-top commercials, which skip right past Scare 'Em Straight and into Narm territory. These gems come complete with dim lighting, silently frowning (or gowned and masked) medical staff, pounding Scare Chord music and a deadly serious voiceover actor reading lines like "Choosing a hospital could be the most important decision you'll ever make" and "It's your heart/eyes/life/whatever... Do you have a Beaumont doctor?" The general effect of the commercials has been to generate an epidemic of spontaneous gluteal detachment secondary to laughter overdose in the viewing population. And then they promptly go get treated somewhere that doesn't sound like a Vincent Price film gone wrong.
They, without irony, say that they're forming a "rainbow coalition."
Their initials spell NOM, and they use them. This may provide narm, especially to those familiar with LOL cats. How can the sound of a cat eating have any serious business attached?
And there's this one, which is about the horrors of having to tell your children about teh gayz, and which plays the idea "Our kids will be taught a new way of thinking!" as something to fear.
Feel free to call, otherwise I may become irritable!
One TV spot for the second Transformers film features Shia Lebeouf's character screaming "Bumblebee!!" in an anguished tone of voice--which may send viewers not familiar with the character named Bumblebee into hysterics.
Even if you are, it's still funny -- especially when your brother snarks, "Hey Shia, what's your favorite brand of tuna?" just before the line comes up.
Boys Beware , a horrible 1950s short film that equates gay people with pedophiles. "What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. You see... RALPH WAS A HOMOSEXUAL." Delivered in a completely serious tone, while inappropriately cheery music plays on the soundtrack.
There are a number of comedic advertisements in New Zealand that involve housewives doing strange and unusual things. As such, when an advert aired that had a women talking about healthy snack food, only to trip over a toy car and plummet into a glass-topped coffee table, many people burst out laughing...only to find out, as the camera panned away and the woman lay there sobbing amongst the glass shards, that it was meant to be a deadly-serious PSA about the dangers of leaving toys about on the floor. "Most accidents occur IN THE HOME." Because negotiating toy-covered floors whilst filming muesli bar commercials in their own home is something that every housewife has to deal with.
Alternatively, you can try: "Eat your peas, Molly! You ungrateful little bitch!"
There's an old commercial that still plays late at night which encourages people to get tested for cancer. It would be admirable, but it features various elderly people who survived cancer -- not actors. They don't even try to emote; they just squint at the camera and read off cue cards. The worst? Just imagine the following quote read in a nasally monotone by the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live:
"Norma Ray. Breast cancer. Three years. Survivor."
The Australian advert for Sci Fi OriginalBoa is quite bizarre. All it shows is a factory at night, a guy looking at something, and a big snake. The narmy narration is apparently the result of a schizophrenic howler monkey who'd been handed various hallucinogens and a broken-down typewriter from 1935.
Narrator: * ominously* If it had legs... maybe you could tie them together... and capture it. But it doesn't... so you can't. Boa.
The ad campaign for the Bionicle Piraka. The first ad is kinda cool, even with (or because of) Thok blowing a presumably Antidermis bubble; but as soon as the painfully gangsta announcer opens his mouth, it's hilarious. And even more hilarious is the Piraka Rap. The video isn't official, but the music is.
War Amps, the Canadian amputee organization, had the infamous PLAYSAFE commercials staring ASTAR, a robot from Planet Danger (the planet with No OSHA Compliance). The "I can put my arm back on--you can't" line was repeatedly parodied in Canadian pop culture.
Book commercials in general, or at least the ones that try to adapt the contents to live action. They're often plagued by cheesy narration over exceedingly low budget footage that make them look more like bargain-bin DVD movies than Literature.
There's a commercial that talks about a medical service that will give you a supply of fresh, disposable catheters. The first commercial showed a woman whining that she had to boil and reuse her catheters. This is amusing until you are informed about the reality of the situation, when it becomes a Funny Aneurysm Moment. The second was for the same service and had an old lady and a handicapped man who delivered their lines in a ridiculously fake-sounding way.
Some old douching commercials were so Narm that they seem like parodies... [2]
Any attempt by ABC Family to use their slogan "A new kind of X". It gets silly. Absolutely everything has to be described this way by the network. How it began: When Disney wanted to rename the channel to "XYZ" to remarket it to a different audience, it discovered that the contracts with the cable companies required that the word "Family" stay in the channel name. Disney being Disney, it went ahead with remarketing ABC Family; "A new kind of Family" was their way of explaining what they were doing (which would eventually be like The WB of basic cable). It snowballed (snowcloned?) from there.
A commercial for a Time-Life documentary of Those Wacky Nazis is hard to take seriously because the voice-over announcer is attempting a terrible Don LaFontaine impression.
It doesn't help when the end-of-infomercial voiceover guy cheerfully pipes up to instruct you how to "order your copy of The Nazis."
South Dakota used to have state-issued radio ads during the wintertime with dramatic, heart-pounding music that is obviously meant to be frightening and a man who sounds like Peter Thomas who drags out the words "DON'T CROWD THE PLOW" in a menacing way. It's utterly hilarious. Sadly, they've realized that and stopped playing it.
Ads for the NBC show The Event before it started airing. They all take the same form: "(insert random, standard plot driving event here) is not the Event. What is the Event?" with a line from the show saying "he's going to tell people about the Event." The whole thing is so overwrought and so generic that many viewers find it impossible to take seriously.
Even better, they strung this series of commercials out so long that some viewers were actually sick of the show before it ever hit the air.
There's a Nesquik advert, and the gist of it is 'kids only grow up once, enjoy it.' This would be quite touching if it weren't for the Nesquik bunny's voice. With it, the advert becomes ridiculous and seems to be trying too hard.
Jamster has been running these advertisements for a "Ghost Camera" for your cellphone. It starts with a voiceover of a woman showing you pictures of various locales from her European trip. She gets increasing confused and edgy from the images of "ghosts" on each of her photos, but by the third photo she freaks out and lets out one of the most unconvincing screams of terror ever. Any iota of suspense built up to that point is completely ruined and turned into narm. To give you an idea, it sounded like the voice actor just flatly read the word "Aaaaaah" aloud from the script.
A notorious anti-drunk driving PSA from circa 1980 with a hysterical housewife chasing after her husband shrieking, “Don't use the car! You'll kill yourself!”
An ad slogan for Tyson Chicken: "It's what your family deserves."
This advertising page for an adult site (need I say "very, very NSFW"?) has such gems as:
[[spoiler: Bruce shoved into her fire hose. And turned on water...
he shoved his big cartoon dick into her narrow vagina and asshole. Her hands and foots were attached to floor. And Bruce fucked her.
So unhappy innocent girl. She will be fucked very much time by Bruce Bond. Her vagina will be much bigger after. Oh, she will be bounded by dirty Bruce.]]
The 24-hour news networks have been showing an ad by the oil companies featuring people on the street talking about taxing energy. Naturally, these people are all smarter about macroeconomics than real economists, even though all economics is inherently uncertain. And they are so not reading from teleprompters; it's just natural to talk like a fourth-grader reading from his reader (i.e., flat and pausing at awkward times).
There is a Canadian road/ambulance safety ad, which starts out with an ambulance with a patient in it and some idiot talking on his cell phone and not paying attention to the road. It's serious up until the point the guy talking on his phone crashes into the ambulance, and you see his face afterwards. It was supposed to come across as the guy feeling awful about what he did, but the Dull Surprise on his face made it look more like he was thinking "Holy shit, that was AWESOME." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on Youtube yet.
Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center Very few people from St. Louis and Kansas City must visit this page. You've got to wonder which poor saps were stuck with composing and singing thejingle. Not to mention the whole "don't suffer in silence" thing is probably more appropriate for victims of domestic abuse or something along those lines, not hemorrhoids.
This Kay commercial features some spectacularly Bad Bad Acting, as well as the gem (no pun intended) that the cold piece of shiny metal "captures the comfort found in each other's arms."
Strangely, the way the woman reacted to the lightning, she acted as though she'd never seen anything brighter than a full moon, or louder than a vacuum.
The Belfast City Council embarked on an anti-litter campaign which features pop art characters expressing horror and disgust any time their companion litters. This results in ads like a picture of a crying girl thinking, "All I did was drop my chewing gum on the ground... and now he won't speak to me!"
And, speaking of Our Wee Country, lest we forget the mind-meltingly narmy "Walking" PSAs that helpfully extolled the benefit of doing just that while singing about it. "Give yourself MORE ENERGY and BETTER SLEEP!"
The trailers for the 2011 Green Lantern movie. Dramatic music, a dying alien dramatically intoning, "Become one of us... become... a Green Lantern!" If you're not familiar with the comics, that's a pretty bizarre request to make in a dramatic scene.
This early '90s road safety campaign from the UK starts off dramatically but rapidly dissolves into Narm: "This child needs help! Anybody!"
The otherwise pretty spooky trailer for the film The Skeptic ends with an intense montage of quick clips, including two shots of people... goofily tumbling down the stairs. Obviously they're supposed to be violently falling, but both actors (especially the woman) just drew their arms in and sort of roll in an un-alarming fashion.
There is a commercial for Montgomery's Furniture (a local furniture store in South Dakota) that basically consists of music that sounds like it should be featured in an action movie....accompanied by random shots of furniture. Yes, the commercial is trying to make furniture seem "Edgy" and "Awesome", but the commercial is just too hilariously bad for it to work.
This ad for a furniture shop definitely qualifies, although there's horror as well; the man's awkward, stilted dialogue, his subtle threat about your credit and the fact that he talks to mannequins are quite alarming.
With T-Mobile's ads about its 4G network came an ad in which a man impatiently pounds on his cellphone for the "slow 3G buffering" occurring on his screen, unable to wait a few seconds.
This message from PETA about animal testing. That it's from PETA should already convince you that it's Narm, but just in case you need further convincing, bear in mind that it's readily apparent that this is... probably an attempt at being scary, but their wording in trying to make it seem that way just comes across as laughable. [1] The following line is especially hilarious if you say it in a dramatic voice:
They get hurt. Bad. BAD. The kind of burning, needing, fear-producing, cage-circling, screaming, SCREAMING, screaming hurt we shudder to even imagine.
The "Testing... 1... 2... 3" part was hilarious too.
A PSA encouraging abstinence bore the tagline "Sex lasts a moment. Being a father lasts your whole life". This was changed from the earlier tagline of "Sex lasts a minute", likely because the only reasonable response would be "Not if you're doing it right".
This commercial shows that you probably won't see the arresting officer coming, especially if you're wasted. Well, it shows that to a serious-minded person. To anyone else, it shows: "Oh my lord! Invisible ninja cops!"
TheFinishingLine, a railway safety film, was regarded as very scary back when it first aired in the 1970s. However, by today's standards, the bad acting, lines such as "You're like a jellian" (According to Guru Larry, a jellian is "A mop-headed child from the seventies that gives pointless strategic advice") and the Captain Obvious Aesop (Don't hold sporting events on railway lines) propel it firmly into Narm territory.
Have you ever read the "Urban Legend" on the side of Paul Newman Lemonade cartons? Try to do it without cringing.
This Anti drug commercial, featuring what seems to be a human, female version of Humpty Dumpty.
"The Devil Inside" looks like a horrific movie, except for one part in the trailer where the possesed mother motions for her daughter to come closer. After a few seconds of awkward silence, she lets out a hilarious scream.
The TV spot shows the rather Adorkable Father Ben letting out a hilariously girly scream as well, and his facial expression doesn't help matters either.
Subaru's "Keepsake" ad. There was also another advertisement from Subaru where a hip young man delivered a forlorn narration as he put his old Subaru out to pasture...Literally.
If you ever took swimming lessons through the American Red Cross water safety program sometime during the last two decades, chances are you were shown "Longfellow’s Whale Tales". You didn’t want to laugh, but you did anyway.
The TV spots for the 2012 action movie Chronicle show a character being hit by a flying bus. It's hard not to laugh at it.
Likewise for the scene where the kid sits cross-legged, staring into the camera with a dead serious facial expression, clenching a fist, crushing a car.
And the "B-BLING, B-BLING!" at the beginning.
A recently released trailer for the horror film House at the End of the Street uses a "rewind" gimmick a la the Dead Island trailer, to show how fine and dandy everything started out before the horror stuff happened. A couple of shots -- such as a teenager backflipping out of a swimming pool and a child flying back onto a swing -- merit at least a chuckle.
The recent anti-tobacco ads running in the US qualify as Narm, if only because the ill effects shown are rarely connected to smoking, and are much too Anvilicious to be taken seriously.
"Can you control your emotions?" (read: control your emotions = avoid laughing)
"BAKE OFF!" Presumably she meant "back off", but they might as well be advertising a " 'back off' bake off" to raise funds by selling banana bread, blueberry muffins and other baked goods.
↑Though how well it works might depend on how much you agree with its message; if you go in with the impression that this is going to be ridiculous, that might help you better notice the amusing aspects of it, but still.
