The Dairy Queen Chili Meltdown GrillBurger Ad

Dairy Queen's latest ad campaign is predicated on a single elegant idea: the restaurant's new Chili Meltdown GrillBurger will make your otherwise attractive girlfriend spread her legs out and fart — for up to ten minutes — into the cushions of your couch.

But not in so many words, of course. The commercial is, as commercials so often are, coy and understated. The male lead offers his GrillBurger to his female companion. She immediately slouches down, changes the television station to a football game, spreads her legs and says "pull my finger."

The Dairy Queen announcer then intones the following statement about the 840-calorie, chili-topped, cheese-laden double hamburger: "It'll make a man out of you." The ad then ends, its sprawling contribution to the arts and sciences finally exhausted.

In the minutes that follow, viewers may try to piece together the underlying message of the advertisement. Women, presumably, don't want to emulate the same revolting habits of men that make us such uniformly terrible long-term life partners. And men, presumably, already have these habits, and therefore don't need to choke down a half pound of Dairy Queen-grade ground beef and tomato sauce in order to acquire them. Men also don't typically hope for their girlfriends and wives to emulate their own revolting quirks of grooming and behavior. One of the best things about dating women is that they generally do a set of terrible things that is non-redundant with our own gender's numerous failings.

In fact, there are only two groups that the "It'll make a man out of you" campaign could possibly expect to appeal to:

Boys — Boys always want to become men, with all the benefits that this suggests: handling firearms, driving cars, purchasing pornographic DVDs, etc. (There is even a popular musical act known as Boyz II Men.)

Female-to-Male transsexuals — If you're planning to switch genders, this ad has gotta ring some bells.

Neither, it should be noted, are particularly crucial segments of the fast food consumer market.

Is "It'll make a man out of you" the worst possible tagline Dairy Queen could have come up with for its new Chili Meltdown GrillBurger? No. They could have gone with "It'll make a hermaphrodite out of you," or even "It'll make an Al Qaeda operative out of you."

But beyond those alternatives, Dairy Queen came pretty close to scraping the bottom of the advertising concept barrel. And a product as sophisticated as the Chili Meltdown GrillBurger deserves better than that.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)