If there’s one thing keeping me sane right now, it’s the reality that I’ve only been following basketball full time again for… roughly a year. It was about this time in 2019 that I watched The NBA Draft for the first time and saw my beloved Golden State Warriors break apart, beginning to build the next generation.
Because of this, it’s far more tolerable to watch old games from even two years ago, finding new players that I want to follow when things resume in Orlando, FL.
There have been ways for me to fight the monotony, but right as I’m watching Shaq give updates, I am reminded of the one thing that has been loathsome about the season when things were on. I’m not talking about watching Kawhi Leonard being on the bench every other play for “load management.” I’m talking about when those fouls require the feed to cut to commercials…
I first discovered the Chris Paul commercials for State Farm in 2019, and I guess it was the wrong way to be introduced. Things started with James Harden putting a Chinese takeout container into a microwave that caused it to explode due to its metal handle. The following one introduced me to their incredible mascot Clutch.
Do you see something wrong with this? My big takeaway wasn’t Chris Paul himself, but the teammate that he royally hated. Many still argue that their inability to play together cost them any chance at Finals glory.
Hero
That is why it felt jarring when the 2020 commercials started rolling around and I noticed that Harden or Clutch wasn’t there. To me, they were the ones who made the commercial memorable. Paul was practically there for a cameo in an already seconds-long production. It took me so long to accept that this mandated piece of marketing was actually meant to feature Paul going on wacky adventures with “Jake from State Farm” before cutting to their slogan:
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Oh sure, I liked the one with the deer because of how straightforward it was. As a deer bangs up Paul’s car and sends bowling balls running down the ramped driveway, it gives the message clearly of what State Farm is. They’re an insurance company meant to protect you in the case of accidents. It’s also funny that it’s a deer because, as the agent would put it, Paul has never played for The Bucks. It’s a nice piece of wordplay and the absurdity of the situation makes you wonder if it’s coincidence or if Brook Lopez is just messing with him.
I think the biggest difference by 2020 is that I’ve grown to appreciate Paul as a player. With The Oklahoma City Thunder, he’s pretty much become an exciting player that I am eager to watch every time. He’s so good at the game that he makes the average quarter entertaining, especially as his short stature pretty much burrows into places that his tall opponents can’t. And, in one of the greatest moments of this season, Paul scored the 100th point in a game against The Houston Rockets by dribbling the ball through a guy’s legs.
I really hope that The Thunder comes back in top shape in Orlando. Even if they’re low on the list of teams likely to win, their underdog status is endearing. You can imagine a situation where they sneak up the list, where CP3 finally gets his due.
Then again, it does sound like State Farm beat me to the self-flagellation. Whereas I can appreciate him as a player, Jake can get a firsthand chance to elevate this praise into an art form. This isn’t some team effort anymore. What follows is both an acknowledgment of how great he is and how absurd hero worship is. It’s also, frankly, a whole lot more annoying than what’s come before.
One of the few things that was relieving about the pandemic was the absence of the State Farm commercials where we had to deal with Alfonso Ribiero, better known to commercial addicts as “The New Chris Paul.”
If you don’t know who Ribiero is, you somehow managed to skip the 1990s entirely. I thought it was just a coincidence that he looked like Carlton Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. There’s no way that he was infiltrating these commercials. He had his own gig as the latest host on America’s Funniest Home Videos and from what I gather he does a decent job on that. He’s upbeat and fun, clearly knowing how to appeal to audiences who enjoy pratfalls of the common man.
Well, looks like he’s just like Paul in the sense that he loves doing commercials with State Farm. Whereas you can get a fun gag out of Clutch shooting a t-shirt gun to House of Pain’s “Jump,” what Ribiero is setting out to do is something even further stretching. This isn’t just a gag for one or two ads. It’s become a miniature franchise that somehow feels like they’ve produced new commercials in the past month. They’re inescapable, and I only wish they had something more than the same joke over and over.
To give you a quick rundown of how a commercial goes, I will use one involving a parking attendant:
Ribiero pulls up in a car, parking in Paul’s spot. As he talks to an attendant, she chastises him for parking in Chris Paul’s spot. He arrogantly continues to walk, claiming that because he has an unconvincing beard that he IS Chris Paul. He proceeds to get the attendant’s name wrong as she calls security and he arrogantly showboats while trying to enter the building. The real Chris Paul arrives in confusion, being told by the attendant that they’re getting it worked out. As he is with every other commercial, there is this sense of frustration that he keeps running into this idiot. Cut to the slogan.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of them are more endearing than others, but the idea of them has worn thin and it’s one of those small respites I was looking forward to in the off-season. The New Chris Paul is not going to be the new Flo from Progressive. There is no need to expand upon the universe and give him this rich inner life. Why does he have to keep coming back to have new people remind us that he’s an imposter and a clumsy one at that? Who let him into Paul’s workout room? Why does he get to handle the dumbbells that haphazardly get thrown at a mirror?
To Ribiero’s credit, there is something charismatic about his lack of. He is this eccentric ball of confidence that you expect a delusional fan to have. The way he pushes himself is reminiscent of the people who think they can be Kobe Bryant if they have “The Mamba Mentality.” You can become great in your own right, but you will never be the new anything. As many inspirational whosits would tell you: be the first you.
Still, the line between sincerely working as a cautionary tale and a running joke about one buffoon is not something that an insurance company should be worrying about. They should be worried about insurance caused by damage. Sure, identity fraud is a form of damage, but you could gather from these commercials is that all that The New Chris Paul does is ruining CP3’s image at every turn. Basically, how do you take down a giant than by mocking him?
My assumption was that Ribiero got the part because it’s now clear that Paul doesn’t like to be filming commercials for more than an hour here or there. In almost every case of these ads, he’s there once again for mostly a cameo. It wasn’t like last year, post-Harden but pre-Ribiero, where the commercials were allowed to be clever, showing something fruitful in the relationships between Paul and the insurance agents.
This includes one where Paul is looking at clouds with his agent and all that he can see is damage, such as burglars breaking into Paul’s home. When Paul asks him to relax, he responds “Not everyone has an off-season.”
It’s quick and simple, and there’s no further commercial expanding upon it. That’s the difference between a good commercial and annoying ones. The best are brief jokes that are precise and reflect something indicative of your product. All that I get out of Ribiero’s is that there’s a crazy stalker out there and his arrogance makes him delusional. It’s funny until you realize that he’s broken into Paul’s home and tried to steal his identity for months now to no avail. When he gets caught, he nervously breaks through a plate of glass and yells “I’m the new Chris Paul!”
As mentioned, I don’t have a lot of experience with Paul’s lengthy relationship with State Farm. I am aware that he’s been doing them since 2014 and that he had jokes about fake relatives, so this is nothing new. There’s a whole universe of commercials out there that try to prove that Paul is game for these jokes. I don’t doubt that he enjoys doing them, but my relationship with The New Chris Paul is not unlike Paul’s relationship with Harden: we can coexist, but I hope to rarely see you after the end of the season.
I know that I’m making a big deal about commercials that may be deemed irrelevant pretty soon here, but it’s one of those great inside jokes you can have if you follow NBA games. There are commercials you will inevitably be exposed to, especially if you like live sports. Among those that have been prominent are State Farm ones that endeared Harden and Clutch to me last year in ways that remain largely positive. Even then, watching them 20 times a week definitely leaves you wishing that one of Clutch’s t-shirts hit Paul in the face just to mix things up.
They become a part of you, and that is why it’s hard to watch these commercials and not groan. I will probably be a few years older, onto the next wave of gags, and I’ll still be thinking about how much of my life was wasted watching The New Chris Paul being a prick. He had no inner life. I’ve spent more time with him than some of my own family and friends, which is really depressing. I don’t feel enriched in the same way that I now do about Clutch. If anything, this is ulterior motives to get me to hate Chris Paul.
And I don’t want to hate Chris Paul.
If anything, I want to like him a whole lot more. I want to see The Thunder dunk on people and be their own entertaining selves. Maybe next year he could find some ways to rope in Shai Gilgous-Alexander and raise his profile to a deserving level. After all, that is what most of these commercials end up doing. Millions will see these State Farm commercials, but very few will buy into it. We’ll have more affection for its characters than the product.
I think of how Mountain Dew uses The Philadelphia 76’ers Joel Embiid’s lack of affectation to make jokes about cheering him up with random gifs. That’s a small endearing trait. Hearing him say “I’m so happy” has something that makes me wish I cared at all about The Sixers. Still, it makes me want to see him react to gifs.
And that is the issue. All that I get out of Paul’s recent run of commercials is frustration that he’s being shown up by an imposter. Oh sure, the deer and cloud commercials are a nice mix-up, but I just want something that enhances my feelings of Paul in ways that I get watching him play. It’s kind of there in that he’s playing into something funny, but he still feels like he’s sidelined. He doesn't feel like the star of these ads, and that’s a bummer. He could create his image into anything he wants, and I hope he finds something more endearing next time.
Comments
Post a Comment