TV Quote of the Day (Mel Brooks, With a Script for a Lucrative Commercial)

“Don’t write with a peach. If you write with a peach, you’ll get a very wet letter. Don’t write with a prune. Words will come out wrinkled and dopey. Let’s face it: The only fruit you can write with is a banana. The Bic Banana. A fine-line marker. Not to be confused with a ballpoint. Writing a letter to your son, right? Right. Usually, I write, ‘Dear son, how are you? I’m fine.’ Write that same letter with a Bic Banana and you’ll get: ‘Dear Sonny, I miss your face, Mom.’ See what a nice letter it writes? And it comes in colors. Most fruits only come in one color, except grapes, which come in two colors and, of course, pits and pitless. Look, if you’ve got to write with a fruit, write with a Bic Banana! It’s only 29 cents. Your best buy in writing fruit. The Bic Banana. A different way to write!”—Script for the “Bic Banana” commercial, included in Mel Brooks, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2022)

There are some commercials engraved in my memory from constant repetition in my impressionable youth. It’s far more unusual for me to recall an ad that did not air too long. It always helps if the latter kind of commercial is insane.

Enter Mel Brooks. In his new memoir, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, director, and actor recalls how, in a financially fallow period in the 1960s when he was courting future wife Anne Bancroft, commercials helped him pay the bills.

The one TV ad he cited was for the Bic Banana. He gave no exact date for his voice-over work for this, but left the impression it was in the 1960s. It could not have been in the early 1960s, as I wasn’t old enough to watch TV regularly then. As it turned out, it was in 1973—after his Oscar for The Producers, but just before his huge success with Blazing Saddles.

I don’t know how much input Brooks had in the actual script for this one-minute ad. I suspect, from what I’ve read on his interactions with show-business collaborators in Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man, that he may not have been easy to get along with the ad men who worked on this.

But if the makers of the Bic Banana wanted their product to get noticed, they sure picked the right person. Just watch this YouTube clip—or rather, because his face is never shown, listen to it. The demented intonation of certain words is classic Brooks. In fact, it can only be Brooks.

(This crazily voiced commercial for a crazily named product would be followed by an even more insane ad, with actor/game show fixture Charles Nelson Reilly dancing and singing--dressed up as a bright, yellow Bic Banana, promoting these markers to similarly dressed schoolchildren.)

If you want an even more unusual Brooks commercial—this time, a 1960s radio ad, with Dick Cavett serving as straight man—then listen to him play “The 2500 Year Old Brewmaster” (a variation on the “2,000-Year-Old Man” character he had played with friend Carl Reiner) for Ballantine Beer.

Quote of the Day (X. J. Kennedy, on TV Car Commercials)

“In car commercials on TV

Cars glide through vast wide-open spaces

Past lake and canyon, glad and free.

In car commercials on TV

Congested streets we never see

Nor desperate quests for parking places.

In car commercials on TV

The world is only open spaces.”— American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author X. J. Kennedy, “A Triolet on Traffic,” in Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse, 1928-2008 (2007)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Saturday Night Live,’ With an Ad for a Product With Two Uses)

Wife [played by Gilda Radner]: “New Shimmer is a floor wax!” 

Husband [played by Dan Aykroyd]: “No, new Shimmer is a dessert topping!“

Wife: “It’s a floor wax!” 

Husband: “It’s a dessert topping!” 

Wife: “It’s a floor wax, I’m telling you!” 

Husband: “It’s a dessert topping, you cow!” 

Spokesman [played by Chevy Chase] [enters quickly]: “Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!  Here, I’ll spray some on your mop.. [sprays Shimmer onto mop] ..and some on your butterscotch pudding.” [sprays Shimmer onto pudding]

Husband [eating while Wife mops]: “Mmmmm, tastes terrific!”

Wife: “And just look at that shine! But will it last?”

Spokesman: “Hey, outlasts every other leading floor wax, two to one. It’s durable, and it’s scuff-resistant.”

Husband: “And it’s delicious!”—Saturday Night Live, Season 1, Episode 9, air date Jan. 10, 1976, directed by Dave Wilson

Quote of the Day (William Talman, in a Landmark Anti-Smoking Ad)

“Before I die I want to do what I can to leave a world free of cancer for my six children.”—Actor William Talman, in a commercial for the American Cancer Society, broadcast a month after his death from lung cancer, quoted in “Legacy,” New Castle News, September 14, 1968

Most viewers of old-time TV know William Talman, born in Detroit on this date a century ago, as District Attorney Hamilton Burger, perennial loser to defense attorney Perry Mason. So did I, when I started watching the classic TV noir based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s classic novels as a child back in the late Sixties. That made it all the more stunning when I first saw this one-minute public service commercial.

Nowadays, it’s commonplace for anti-smoking ads featuring real people, in all their excruciating pain, to air. It was not so at the tail-end of the Mad Men era. You can imagine, then, the extraordinary impact of an actor on one of the most popular TV dramas for nine seasons, not only saying he was dying but announcing his killer: the cigarette habit he had picked up at age 12.

The actor had been able to give up heavy drinking after his third marriage, but not the three packs of cigarettes a day he had reached. In 1967, a year after the end of his show’s run, Talman learned that inoperable lung cancer meant his life would be running out, too.

A November 2001 Boston Globe article by Columbia University historian Barron H. Lerner (reprinted on the History News Network Website) discussed the compelling circumstances behind the commercial’s making: how the actor approached the American Cancer Society with the idea for the ad; then, how Talman, gaunt and frequently foggy from morphine to dull his pain, summoned his strength long enough to warn the public from repeating his mistake (“I’ve got lung cancer. So take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who’s been doing both for years: If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke, quit. Don’t be a loser.”).

It says something about the initial seductiveness of cigarettes—then, its tight grip on human biochemistry—that the actor’s family, try as it might after witnessing his final agony, could not take his advice. His son Tim took up the habit before finally quitting. Wife Peggy was more tragic. After quitting at her husband’s urging—and even after speaking out on behalf of the American Cancer Society in the early 1970s—she began smoking again. Thirty years later, she, too, was found to have inoperable lung cancer.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Glee’s’ Sue Sylvester, on Advertisers)

"Commercials aren’t real life. Advertisers are manipulative alcoholics who use images to play on our emotions. Haven't you seen Mad Men?"—Sue Sylvester (played by Jane Lynch), in Glee, "Prom-asaurus," Season 3, Episode 19, written  by Ryan Murphy, directed by Eric Stoltz, air date May 8, 2012