The Kitchen Table

Stan Freberg died last week. Very few people here (or even anyone we all know) will know who he is.

Actually, he phoned me up in the late nineties because he’d seen something I wrote about Howard Gossage, who was one of Stan’s buddies. I guess Stan figured that anyone who liked Gossage as much as I did must be okay.

 Stan was the humor muse of the late 50s and early 60s.  He made hit comedy records, produced movies, and wrote advertising that was sublime.  He was on all the talk shows and in all the boardrooms.  His stuff was magic.  Imagine Louis CK slash Seth Rogin slash Banksy.  For the better part of a decade, Stan was comedy.

He was, as you might expect, gruff, hilarious, and dismissive of the current agency scene.  In fact, today, when we make fun of commercials and news, we are doing something he did before you were born.

Stan asked me to write the liner notes on his last collection of show and commercial material.  He was uncharacteristically humbled by what I sent him.  I thought I would send it along.

Thanks, Free.

Yeah, He Wrote Ads Better Than Everyone Else Too

You can’t imagine how big Stan Freberg was back at Lippitt Elementary School in Warwick, Rhode Island. He was this weird guy, off to the side of everything, whose stuff actually sounded more like the stuff he made fun of than the stuff he made fun of ever did in the first place. We craved his sense of humor like sunlight and air. When everyone else was doing political humor about The Bomb and The Beats and conformity (our parents’ biggest concern), Freberg crossed the wires of the grown-up world in ways that–it’s not too big to say–got to the truth.

It’s difficult sometimes to tell the difference between Freberg’s radio shows and his commercials, between humor and humor that’s supposed to make you do something you might not otherwise do. The Puffed Grass campaign with its most terrific timing and brilliantly gratuitous laugh track invites us in with the same tones used in real advertising for Contadina and Terminix. This, of course, is what makes Stan dangerous. People like me strained to hear his advertising. We turned the radio up, hushed everyone around the television set. The denizens of Eisenhower’s military industrial establishment and the best and the brightest of the sixties sought Stan out like some advertising martial arts master. They trusted him implicitly to find the intersection between what was funny and what they had to sell. Stan’s friend Howard Gossage, the famous San Francisco advertising writer, once said that people listen to “whatever interests them. Sometimes it’s advertising.” Freberg was the gatekeeper to this promised land. For a long time, he printed the tickets.

Listening to this collection, I feel I am ready to proclaim that I like Freberg’s advertising more than anything he’s done. I may have a soft spot for his ads because it’s how I first encountered him. But I also think that advertising writing may well reward the great parodist like Freberg more than any other type. Like haiku or the sonnet, advertising sticks you with an implicit form–people know you’ve got a job to do, that you have to get across a couple of key pieces of information and the name of the product before the minute’s up. Bad advertising writers see this as a handicap, but the brilliant ones, like Stan, realize that the mundaneness of what must be conveyed can actually augment the humor when it’s placed in an unfamiliar context. The audience is aware of this job you’re doing, and they love it when you find a way to surprise and delight them.

It’s like environmentalism on the airwaves. The lucky few like Freberg are running a business here that’s so sensitive to its environment that it’s suddenly welcome and, indeed, anticipated.

In Stan’s hands, car commercials and the yeoman job of selling Chun King Chow Mein actually add up to something light years beyond the sum of the parts when he brings us “the 1966 Chun King (Noodles optional.)” At the moment of truth, Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick is thwarted by a guy who uses Pittsburgh Paint color chips to quibble about whether they’ve got the right whale. Gilbert and Sullivan (Do people know who Gilbert and Sullivan are? Who cares?) are trotted out to sell Meadow Gold Milk (“So good it’s almost too much to endure”). And Irving Bell, the miserable showbiz wannabe potato chip, gets his big chance one night when the lead chip goes down with a sprain.

These devices tell us something important about the world around us. In parodying the forms, they tell us volumes about each form in itself.

However, when you mix in a piece of serious information, the effect can be even more arresting. In perhaps his most famous commercial, Freberg concocts a giant ice cream sundae in Lake Michigan to demonstrate the power of radio. (In the same campaign, he also takes us on an eclectic tour of the inside of his head, and somehow compels Sarah Vaughn to sing a jingle that rhymes “radio” with “toast and marmaladio.”) The sundae is a McLuhan-like commentary on media, incestuously delivered through the very medium in question.

But certainly my favorite of Stan’s efforts in this regard is his campaign in support of the Hatfield-McGovern Amendment that would have ended the war in Vietnam. Thinking back, it’s pretty quixotic to believe that some radio commercials were just the tool for this job, especially hilarious ones in which an industrial magnate asks “Can’t you manage to drag it out any longer?” and a salesman presents the new improved “Vietnamatic III” that not only counts bodies, but noses, say, or “left ears for April.” Who hired Freberg to do these things? What were they thinking? I have no idea.

Of course, I have failed to mention so many other enduring pieces in this collection, including “Oregon Oregon,” the silliest musical ever written, which includes a song called “A Territory’s Great But You Gotta Have A State” and features my all-time favorite Freberg rhyme: “Got a most discreet crevasse to separate New Hamp and Mass.” You’ve got a most welcome trashing of new age marketer Faith Popcorn (Pop Faithcorn) that sends up her infamous predictions of ubiquitous “nesting” and “cocooning” in the nineties (“If everybody’s cocooning, who’ll deliver the egg rolls?”) And listen for Freberg’s hidden parody of the Police in the tribute to Lewinsky, Lipinski, and Kaczynski.

Finally, however, there is that voice.

As much as anything, to me, Freberg’s voice is the key to his success, his most influential element. Consciously or unconsciously, Stan’s tone and timing have been emulated by everyone from Firesign Theater to Dan Akroyd to Garrison Keillor (as you listen, think of Lake Wobegone and Powdermilk Biscuits). It’s a sound that captures our collective powerlessness in the face of the Big Selling Machine, and embodies the distrust and self-defensive humor we all adopt to cope. It is the voice of us, or at least a smarter, wittier version of ourselves.

It’s Freberg’s secret, if there is one. While most advertisers and entertainers talk down to us, Stan treats us as an equal. He presumes we’ve got a terrific sense of humor, that we can hang with the parodies and the timing. He looks for the highest common denominators, rather than the lowest. It makes all the difference.

One of Freberg’s “power of radio” commercials complains, “Excuse me, you left the door to my mind open.” In a sense, that’s what he’s done here. And lucky for us.