Arby's Oven Mitt ads

The afterlife of failed art follows a predictable and sometimes tragic pattern.

Failed drama can be recycled into comedy. Wildly pretentious films are often a total hoot — if you've seen the fat guy in Crash rubbing his own gigantic man titties while sitting on a couch watching videotapes of car accidents, you've been there. Hollow commercial robots like Crossroads and From Justin to Kelly can be truly entertaining if you're able to enjoy their 8th-grade sense of wonder and deep inherent crapulence. And sanctimonious after-school specials — including just about anything where authority figures bumblingly try to project an aura of coolness — can easily rival the laughs-per-minute ratio of a solid episode of "Cheers."

But comedy that fails — with very few exceptions — simply fails. It creates awkward silences, forced grimaces, and general discomfort. It bathes us in its own sad aura of humiliation, and makes us feel grimly disappointed.

Such is the lot of the Arby's talking oven mitt.

What's truly depressing about the commercials — besides the fact that they're probably a significant percentage of Tom Arnold's current livelihood — is that they didn't have to turn out this way.

Another scenario "Holy shit, oven mitt! Can you hear me?" More ›

A talking oven mitt could be a truly funny thing, but the commercials skirt the edge of the symbol's potential.

A recent commercial, for example, portrays the mitt grappling with the fact that it lacks facial features such as a nose, or ears. But like a bargain-basement incarnation of a Disney movie sidekick character, the "humor" is expressed with a great deal of yelling and verbal bumbling.

There's nothing seditious going on here. There's nothing in the commercial that's particularly out of character — or shockingly in character for an animated oven mitt stuck in a 30-second-spot for a second-string fast food restaurant. It's like seeing Jason Alexander in a chimp movie — briefly disorienting and then surprisingly boring.

And there ain't no chimps in the Arby's commercials.

The "I don't have a nose!" commercial flirts with greatness and goes nowhere. The concept is great: There are actually plenty of good reasons for an Arby's mitt to have an existential crisis. Honestly: Imagine that you're a talking oven mitt. What the hell. It sounds like a particularly terrifying episode of "The Twilight Zone."

Let's survey just a few of the deeply disturbing — and thus potentially hilarious — roads of self-examination for a floppy piece of food-handling fabric that can think and talk.

1) You will never know the pleasure of physical love. As an oven mitt, you cannot feel the thrill of romance. Your world is constricted to the kitchen. You are, for all intents and purposes, a neutered slave.

2) As a one-of-a-kind creation, you will never know the pleasure of spending time with other oven mitts. There is no evidence of any kind of oven mitt community — Arby's poor mascot is trapped among a group of slightly weirded-out underpaid fast food employees who probably lock it up in a breadbox whenever the cameras are off.

3) Your biology, metabolism and lifespan are unknown. You may live for thousands of years, accumulating the wisdom of fallen civilizations. Or you may die tomorrow, burned up in a freak grease flareup. Or perhaps you never die at all, no matter how tattered and burned your mortal form becomes. Who knows?

Any of these meditations could spawn a great commercial. "Can you imagine," the mitt might confide to some exhausted third-shift worker, "what it is like to never be able to be truly close to anyone? To never feel the pure, fulfilling physical release of sexual stimulation? That's how I'm living, every day."

To then have that same worker indifferently shove his hand into the mitt in order to shift the position of some roast beef would be absolutely hilarious.

But no: The Arby's oven mitt is as bland as the committee that obviously set the constricted limit of the commercials' "humor." Digging deep is forbidden. In another commercial, the mitt cooly alludes to being adopted. That's a fine starting point. But from where was the mitt originally spawned? What state agency oversaw and regulated its adoption? Or is talking about its "adoption" really just the mitt's way of coping with its own captivity?

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