Here’s why I’m sharing this ad for Manhattan Mini Storage. I want to point out that we not only pull conceptual ideas from the culture around us, but we grab grammatical ones as well. Not just catch phrases, but comedic structure that informs a joke.
Here, the style is: Offer up an idea, then point to its absurdity not by a facial expression of a ‘yeh, right!’ but by adding a defining point at the end. The twist. This style was perfected and (for me) made famous by Seth Meyer and Amy Poehller on Weekend Update. It was a fun wry structure they used to point out the absurdity of a person, moment, behavior.
The Manhattan Mini Storage team took this structure and basically, made an ad out of it. Maybe the team had been speaking this way because they loved the sound of it. I’m wildly guilty of getting stuck on something until it drives people insane.
Or maybe the structure, being a well embedded meme, just came to the writer or art director. The point is, the idea would likely not have been written this way if Seth Meyer hadn’t been delivering every Saturday night.
Text would go here relating to the offer