The 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time

It didn't take long after the rise of TV commercials in the mid-twentieth century for comedians to take note of just how ridiculous most of those commercials were. Doctors selling cigarettes, housewives defending their laundry detergent as if any other detergent (the menacing "Brand X") were a threat to the American way of life — boob-tube marketing was a bottomless pit of material, and was bound to be soaked up by the sketch-comedy boom that followed shortly thereafter.

Parodies of such ads began popping up in the early '70s on shows like Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. But it was Saturday Night Live's 1975 debut that ripped the genre wide open. Madison Avenue's glib, cheeseball patter became fodder for regulars like Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner, and some of their successors — most notably straight-man kingpin Phil Hartman — built an entire career on it. As advertising grew more sophisticated, so did the satires that chased it. In today's irony-saturated comedy landscape, it's difficult to find a sketch show that doesn't do fake ads in one form or another.

Click the picture below to explore the parodies for yourself:


Maybe I'm being selfish but, if I could bring back only one lost celeb from the last quarter century, Phil Hartman would still be with us today. The man was a comedic genius and he's sorely missed.