How Vulgarity Promotes Honesty on The Tim Dillon Show

    

The following is an essay I wrote for a college rhetoric class in the fall of 2022.

In this essay I will undertake a narrative criticism of an advertisement performed by Tim Dillon, a comedian who uploads weekly episodes of his podcast, The Tim Dillon Show, to YouTube. Both Dillon's stand-up comedy and his podcast are known for lengthy, off-the-cuff tirades and rants. A man with a self-proclaimed silver tongue, Dillon is a master storyteller whose commitment to a brash, over-the-top persona stokes an unending torrent of personal anecdotes and opinions on current events. His persuasive power lies in his knack for pushing things to their narrative extremes while injecting steady doses of dark humor. He brings listeners to the edge of a cliff and convinces them to keep walking, to follow him on another brutal yet expertly crafted hypothetical. Nowhere does this quality shine more than Dillon's ad reads (I will use the term "ad read" to describe Dillon's improvised performance of the advertisement, whereas "ad copy" refers to the scripted guide provided by the sponsoring company). There is a saying -- "constraint breeds creativity" -- which partially accounts for the brilliance of his ad reads. For Dillon, whose career is staked on his ability to attract and hold attention, the introduction of specific products and a clear objective -- sell the product -- provides a foothold from which he gleefully spins ridiculous narratives about the listener's relationship to the product, dishing out calls to action which would make even the most amoral Mad Men sheepish.

Dillon's approach is marked by a radical disdain for the task of marketing, often beginning ad reads in a flat, disinterested voice. Of course, his disdain is not unfamiliar -- most if not all listeners can easily conjure annoyance for the predictable and trite tactics of advertising with which they have been bombarded since childhood. However, it is Dillon's willingness to lean into these feelings at great personal risk (more than a few companies have terminated their contracts with the show over vulgar, offensive ad reads) which makes his approach radical. Other comedy podcasters, despite both a shared desire to be funny and similar misgivings about advertising, dutifully enact advertisements with limited divergence from the script. Moreover, although these same podcasters might host equally irreverent shows, they do not transfer this irreverence to their ad reads in the same way Dillon does. In fact, far from censoring himself, Dillon seems to grow more maniacal during ad reads.

The ad read I chose to discuss -- for a sexual performance enhancer called Blue Chew -- is typical of Dillon's style. I decided on this advertisement because it is quite contained (i.e. free of the tangents which sometimes disrupt Dillon's ad reads) and showcases the core principles of his persuasive strategy. The ad read is taken from an episode released in February 2020, when the show was relatively obscure (Dillon curtailed the vulgarity of his ad reads as the show's popularity increased). The ad is edited into the episode so that listeners must skip over the ad -- usually demarcated by a full-screen image of the brand logo and promotion code -- if they wish to return to the main content of the episode. However, as many YouTube comments affirm, Dillon's fans are unusually tolerant of the ad breaks, a testament to Dillon's penchant for enlivening ads. Also, because they are woven into the rest of the episode, ads sometimes arrive at odd times, such as in the middle of a rant about why people should shoot Tesla owners in the face. Compared to the thousands of milquetoast advertisements listeners regularly encounter, Dillon's crude scenarios can be a shock to the system, jolting people to attention.

In many of his ad reads, Dillon casts the listener in lowly, unflattering terms, either directly or by mockingly depicting the listener as a godlike figure. People are depicted to be in desperate need of the product, lest they be visited by death, scorn, bankruptcy, cancer, or some other misfortune. This Blue Chew ad is no different. Dillon begins building the world of the advertisement by reading verbatim from the scripted ad copy: "Guys, remember the days when you were always ready to go, when you could adequately perform for your partner -- remember those days?" Throughout the ad, scripted bits are distinguishable from improvised speech by their tameness and relevance, as well as a change in Dillon's voice, which drops to a bored droning. Henceforth, analysis of the ad copy itself may inadvertently crop up, but my focus is on how Dillon reframes the copy. Specifically, how he extends and magnifies the implications of the scripted phrase "remember those/the days" by using it as an interjection which guides his lurid narrative.

Although the narrative is hypothetical, Dillon manufactures a past of bygone virility and enviable status for the penis-having audience. Whether or not this applies to an individual listener, Dillon, in conjunction with Blue Chew's ad copy, assumes the listener desires renewed access to this realm of power and pleasure. The opening salvo (quoted above) is nothing more than a crude herald for nostalgia as the primary force (sole, if not for sex) in the world laid out by Blue Chew's marketing campaign. Perhaps it is the natural dimensions of marketing, the demand for the least common denominator, which plays perfectly into Dillon's comedic and persuasive styles. After identifying the potential of this motif and locating its crystallized form in the RTD phrase (rather than write out "remember those/the days" every time, I will use this acronym as shorthand), Dillon articulates its not-so-hidden connotations, recalling the days "when you had hope and the potential to maybe get a job that you didn't hate . . . you were gonna buy a beautiful home and have a family."

The motif quickly exhausted and stretched to its limit, Dillon pivots to the phrase itself, sputtering out a word soup of RTD iterations: "Remember those days, remember that, back then?!" Delivered in an exasperated tone, this line can be understood as a comment on the clumsiness of nostalgia -- both its presentation in this ad and its occurrence in ordinary life. The ad read takes shape as Dillon fills in the narrative sketch -- dashed promise and lingering regret tied to sexual performance -- with a montage of slips and stumbles on the way to the listener's rock bottom. The sequence details a life of drug addiction and desperation. "Remember those days," asks Dillon, "when you could handle your booze . . . when you weren't horribly addicted to heroin . . . when you weren't literally barricading your mother in her fucking bathroom because she was afraid of you?" After each new detail in this rapidly escalating narrative, Dillon returns to the RTD phrase, using the repetition to suggest that life is an unavoidable and impending disaster. The sequence, which culminates with a stolen car and a trip to the city to buy heroin, is punctuated by a loud, drawn-out RTD that reintroduces a level of self-awareness to the ad. Something in Dillon's tone -- perhaps its whiny yet punctuated quality -- not only reminds listeners, who are caught looking at the cascade of misfortunes with equal parts horror and mirth, that they are hearing a real advertisement, but also, more importantly, that Dillon's extreme rhetoric is a reflection of the world as seen through the lens of advertising.

Dillon's willingness to accept the principal inducements of the ad -- regret, loneliness, impotence -- translates as refreshing and captivating. There is something appealing about his honest representation of the advertisement's basic assumptions. So often we absorb advertisers' messages without either acknowledgement of their predatory nature or a viable outlet to purge the perverted distortions they assemble from our lives. Dillon, by embracing and magnifying the disturbing mechanics of advertising, invites listeners to indulge in a narrative which insults and demeans them yet does so with their consent. Somehow, despite its frightening assurance that "you can go back to those days, before you let the demon inside you take over, before you started sucking dick for heroin in a supermarket parking lot," Dillon's ad read is less menacing or deceitful than an average ad.

As the ad becomes increasingly vivid, various characters begin to crowd the scene. Directly and indirectly, Dillon brings to mind the listener's sexual partners and family members. Though he offers templates -- "when your mother and father looked at you and it wasn't with pure disgust and fear" -- Dillon does not give face or life to these characters. The listener is left to populate the hypothetical world with real people and places. Whether or not listeners' lives truly resemble the life of Dillon's sorry protagonist, and whether or not they actually need Blue Chew, listeners are convinced of the world's authenticity. It becomes recognizable. This is largely due to the coherence between Dillon's interpretation of the advertisement and the advertisement's assumptions and hopes for consumers, which Dillon merely draws out and shapes to his liking. Exploiting fear and insecurity is a tried-and-true marketing strategy. However, when an advertisement fails to integrate itself into the world of the consumer/listener, whatever persuasive power it threatened to unleash is throttled. Dillon's humor disguises a petition for the narrative's legitimacy. His tone and hypotheticals constantly alert listeners to the predatory goals of the ad copy.

After reaching a crescendo in the first half of the ad read by slowly and dramatically asking listeners if they "remember what it felt like to be a human being and just enjoy the sun," Dillon paints another morbid scene, that of a homeless can peddler whose friend, Karen, ignores out of fear and disgust. "She shut the door of her house," Dillon explains, "because she saw you . . . and you looked gaunt and pale, and your eyes are sunken into your head." In addition to further drawing the listener into the catastrophe that is their supposed life, this scene transitions into an jarring mashup of ad copy and ad read: "Remember those days, before that was your reality? Before the drug had literally taken over your entire body? Remember those days? (pause) Blue Chew is made in the USA! And since Blue Chew prepares and ships direct, they're cheaper than a pharmacy. I mean, how cool is that?" Here, Dillon's RTD interjections sound almost cheerful, maximizing the twisted humor on which his show thrives. When Dillon switches from his hypothetical to the scripted ad copy, announcing with mock pride that Blue Chew is produced in the United States, Dillon's tone not only reflects his brand of comedy, but also the absurdity of the advertisement, which aims to exploit listeners' fears and failures while maintaining an air of cheery nonchalance and legitimacy. Dillon's deliberately half-hearted "how cool is that?" elicits a shriek of background laughter from the show's producer, Ben Avery, because the question takes on a double meaning. It is cool that Blue Chew is cheaper than pharmacies, and it is cool that you have developed a crippling heroin addiction, priming you for the product.

As the ad winds down, Dillon invents a few more scenes of desperation. He imagines the listener defecating outside and nearly eating a cat. Fully immersed in the logic of the advertisement, Dillon distills the central motif into its purest form: "Do you remember those days, when you used to shit inside, and you were always ready to go? That hard dick -- young, hopeful. Remember those days?" With these lines, Dillon perfectly synthesizes ad copy and ad read. The listener understands precisely where Dillon is coming from and grasps the underlying logic of the advertisement. It is interesting that Dillon describes only the aftermath of "those days"-- your life now, in all its horrid glory -- despite the ad's original, scripted focus on reclaiming positive aspects of youth (ostensibly, an erect penis). By shifting the focus to an escape of the listener's present circumstances, rather than a reclamation of the listener's past, Dillon increases the ad's relevance while exposing the ad's hidden agenda. Although the ad copy appears to induce in listeners a desire to return to happier times in their lives, its actual goal is to generate a desire to escape their lives, the flip side of any nostalgia project.

Although Dillon's ad read is not for the faint of heart, it resonates with listeners because it approaches the task of marketing with a subversive honesty. Ads are intended to manipulate, to deceive, to offer the feeling of empowerment before swapping it for disappointment at the last second. Today, ads are everywhere. However, apart from sheer ubiquity, through which ads seem to have been successfully integrated into daily life, most ads are not willing to cross the boundary separating the narrow, formulaic world of advertising from the rich, unpredictable world of humans. Dillon's marketing strategy offers an alternative approach -- by embracing rather than disguising the crude assumptions of advertising, consumers can be treated with more dignity even as they shuffle shamefully past Karen's house.

 

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