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Characters in commercials are obsessed about the product, and think about nothing else but the product. Their work and family are nothing but mere window dressing for their obsession with Product X. An entire series of a certain company's commercials never show these people doing anything normal. In office situations, you begin to wonder what sort of work gets done in these offices, and how they can have the time when they're talking about bowel irregularity and male enhancement all day. Teenagers take their girlfriends on a date to a greasy spoon like McDonalds and none of them ever complain. Epic family quarrels arise from discarding unused cell phone minutes.
Examples of Neurosis Commercialis include:
- Those commercials where the kids wreck the car into the garage and the dad is more upset about the cell phone bill.
- A woman is so obsessed about making people think she didn't get Glade candles that she takes the labels off and lies to her friends about them.
- A certain contraceptive commercial involves a group of women that get together to talk about said product and how it "makes your skin look better," and normal communication is thrown in at the end as an afterthought. "Are we ever going to eat!"
- Those people on the Cialis commercials that sit in two separate bath tubs. Forever.
- Recently Lampshaded by a later Cialis ad campaign, which asks "When will we get out of those bathtubs?" Cue variations on "when the time is right."
- <Insert-City-Here>helpwanted.com's[1] radio commercials feature a "boss" who tells his secretary, "Mrs. Norbit", to get new employees for the company. While he apparently eats (he puts four donut balls in his mouth), the only thing he discusses with Mrs. Norbit is hiring new employees. Considering how long the commercials have run, his company should be so full of employees that they need to start firing them to compensate for the tremendous amount of dead weight on the budget. You never get to find out what they actually do there.
- Safe Auto's mascot speculates that all the people in a coffee shop are simultaneously using their computers to switch insurance providers online.
- The kids who are so obsessed with trash bags they start their own home television network, "Glad TV."
- The families who love Chips Ahoy so much they have football games and water fights to determine who gets them.
- A recent radio ad for the site doublemyspeed.com has everyone who's used the site being able to say nothing other than the site's name at double speed, and the boy in one of these families apparently goes around the neighborhood all day proselytizing about it. This is for a site that's supposed to do nothing more than remove malware/viruses from your computer.
- In The Jack Benny Program on radio, Mr Wilson was completely enamored of Jello. And later, the Sportsman Quartet would sing rhapsodies to Lucky Strikes.
- On Fibber McGee and Molly, Mr. Wilcox did nothing but extol the virtues of Johnson's Glo Coat floor wax.
- Parodied and played for laughs by an advertisement for Trident Layers gum, in which a slightly-eerie Stepford Smiler family is thrilled that their patriarch is now getting paid in gum. A chimney sweep even pops out of the fireplace to share their joy, and the camera pans to show a disappointed-looking electrician complaining that he never gets paid in gum.
- ↑ There's a whole group of these sites owned by the same company; Kansas City Help Wanted, Bakersfield Help Wanted, etc.