Summarized in this article beautifully as a video in which “grown men … dance to shrill synth beats while eating Totino’s pizza rolls out of a tiny pink backpack,” comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s commercial for Totino’s pizza rolls depicts an authentic and successful marriage between image, music, sound, and editing — a true multimedia experience. After all, as the comment below reminds us, this is a real commercial:
Totino’s actually paid Tim and Eric to create an advertisement featuring their product, and they’re not the first ones to do so (check out these pieces for Absolut and Old Spice). But what exactly is the fine line that separates this masterpiece from a Mountain Dew-fueled fever dream of a last minute assignment thrown together the night before a freshman English presentation?
There’s definitely… a lot to unpack here. Much of the ad’s effectiveness lies in incongruity theory, or the idea that part of what makes something funny is presenting the unexpected. In his Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant writes, “In everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd.”
This definition of incongruity theory also touches on irony, which derives power from an awareness of what is expected and plays off of that expectation by subverting it. Much of Tim and Eric’s humor relies on this principle, often pushing past a primary boundary into the absurd. The juxtaposition of a tiny pink backpack on a grown man, for example, is ironic enough, but in the segment from 0:28-0:35 the team takes it further by cutting away from the scene and labeling this backpack as a “Feminine Pizza Bag.” In this cut scene, Tim and Eric are made tiny and the tiny pink backpack is made huge, with the duo standing on top of it. This takes the juxtaposition one degree further — using something that already lies outside a norm (shrinking a backpack and putting it on someone who you would not normally see wearing said backpack), pinpointing some aspect that makes it weird (it’s really small!), and then inverting that quality (let’s make it large and put Tim and Eric on the bag instead of putting the bag on Eric), then sequencing those two visuals back to back to back. This happens in a span of less than ten seconds, which is not a lot of time for your brain to consciously grab on to all of these intricacies, further playing into the absurdity of it all.
Repetition is another powerful tool throughout the video. From an auditory standpoint, the chorus “Totino’s, Totino’s, how did you know!” comes and goes throughout the video in various forms. It opens with the original iteration in the exposition, but later revisits Tim and Eric in a greenscreened kitchen just chanting “Totino’s” over and over. In fact, thanks to a transcript provided in the comments by user HannibalOrJustRex, we know that the word “Totino’s” comes up no less than 29 times. The majority of this repetition is concentrated near the end of the video, which devolves into an Einstein-on-the-Beach-esque chorus of “Totino’s,” “Whoo” (from Tim), and “Yeah” (from Eric), before a closing word from Hard Rock Joe and a final “Whoo/Yeah” from Tim and Eric, respectively. This progression from coherent nonsense distilled down to the most basic dialogue consisting solely of product name and cheers of enthusiasm falls under that same umbrella of absurdist incongruity theory, but does so in a way that still abstractly relates to the original topic at hand (Totino’s = Good). From an advertising standpoint, it also sends the subliminal message tying the product (Totino’s) to a positive reaction (Whoo/Yeah), which strengthens the overall effect of the work.
Visual repetition is an equally powerful element at play. The video opens and closes with snippets of Hard Rock Joe talking about his love of punk bass and pizza rolls over a green screen backdrop of a dimly lit brick room. Whenever we see Hard Rock Joe by himself throughout the video, it’s in this setting, and the three principal scenes in this setting are the very beginning, middle (1:35), and very end. Repetition abounds within a lot of these recurring green screen backgrounds — take the layered pizza one at 0:15 (which comes back at 0:25 and 1:15), or the cut and paste city assembled from a combination of pizza rolls, party pizza boxes, and standard run-of-the-mill pizzas at 0:27. The pizza with holes cut out of it here is actually derived from the pizza mask the unnamed woman wears in the exposition at 0:08, and resurfaces in the backdrop at 2:28 (as evidenced below).
A similar repetition out of context can be found with the glasses Eric wears in the pizza chess scene — we saw a cut and paste version of those on Hard Rock Joe near the beginning (0:22). And there are plenty of scenes with duplicates of Tim or Eric — we have three Tims on screen at 1:32, five Tims at 1:59, and three Erics at 2:32, for instance. There’s also two separate scenes where each sings with mouths replacing their eyes — Tim at 1:35, and Eric at 2:29.
This repetition of image and sound provides us with a sense of formal structure throughout, however abstract, whether it’s revisiting Hard Rock Joe in his punk bass dungeon, repeating a backdrop as with the layered pizzas, or repeating a word or phrase. This purposeful reuse of previous material, no matter how fleeting or subtle, provides a thread for our subconscious to follow, which is what allows us to view the whole thing as a (somewhat) coherent single entity as opposed to a string of random unrelated vignettes. Again, this is all presented in a very fast paced manner, not something we consciously pick up on but rather dependent on the fact that the human brain is hard-wired to detect pattern and repetition.
A lot of the time we hear responses to contemporary art (and by extension contemporary music) like, “My kid could do that — so unimpressive,” or “I can’t tell the difference between that and garbage,” or “What’s this doing in a gallery? That’s not art!” These reactions imply a few things. First, that the artist is not talented; consequentially, that a determining factor of “talent” lies in how easy it is for the viewer to “get” the meaning at first glance; and finally, an output fueled by anger at the museum or concert hall or whatever space said piece of art finds residence for allowing that piece of art to be put on display. To me, comments like this are a visceral negative response that allow the (often narrow-minded) viewer to maintain a sense of superiority, maintain power in an unfamiliar context, and maintain the same worldview they had before it was challenged by the idea that something different or hard to understand could have something powerful and relevant behind it. In the words of this Guardian article, that’s a big part of what makes Contemporary Art art: “As long as someone thinks modern art is rubbish, it is still provocative. It is still dangerous.”
A lot of the negative reactions to Tim and Eric’s work (the Totino’s advertisement being no exception) contain a similar veiled anger. One comment reads:
And to an extent, he does have a point, with regard to timing. I don’t think this kind of humor would have resonated as strongly 20 years ago, and it also seems to resonate better with younger audiences than older demographics. But the reason this dynamic duo finds success is because the “nonsense” they put out is so carefully not random. It toes the line between expectation and absurdity in a way that plays with your head but still leaves you with the impression that you’ve watched some abstraction of a single idea, as opposed to a disparate smattering of screenshots and soundbites of unrelated material. It provokes a powerful reaction from most people because there is intent in the execution and coherency in the concept, no matter how absurd that concept might be. That, to me, is the mark of something great: the ability to evoke a strong emotional response, and make people think, whether or not that response is positive or negative.
