“Got no job? We don’t care. Got a bad credit rating? We don’t care. Got a prison record? We don’t care. Don’t expect to pay us? That’s when we care!”
These should be words near and dear to most direct marketers’ funny bones, if not their hearts. They make up one of the more notorious sentiments from Art Fern, the oily, unctuous television pitchman portrayed by Johnny Carson, who died early Sunday morning.
Late night television was never big in my house. My introduction to Carson – and Fern – came at the hands of my grandmother, who was a Tonight Show devotee. What I was doing up at such a late hour during the early 1970s, when I was a pre-teen, is beyond me, but I imagine I was thrilled with the opportunity.
And every once in a while we’d see Carson performing as Fern, who was the host of Tea Time Movies. Tea Time Movies usually featured a dubious cinematic endeavor along the lines of “Ma and Pa Kettle Join The Black Panthers” or “Gidget Takes On Fort Ord”. But the real fun was in the products Fern hawked.
Some, such as Gypsu Knives, were straight parodies of late-night TV staples. Others, like Sette City Discount Furniture Warehouse, were questionable retail establishments that offered a wide variety of home furnishings (in the Tiny Tim Traditional, late Quasimodo, or early Chang Kai-Chek styles).
Many were flat-out bits of satire that needled advertising’s tendency to stretch the truth, such as the offer to have one’s poetry set to music by the Famous Music School of Rogers & Hammerstein. That would be Phil Rogers and Itsy Hammerstein, who would set customers’ poetry to tunes composed “by an actual music person with sideburns.” All right, so not all of the bits aged especially well.
Those of Fern’s pitches designed to generate store traffic would end with a complex series of driving instructions that even OnStar would have difficulty following. (“Take the Ventura Freeway to another freeway until you get to the Slauson cutoff. Stop the car. Get out of your car. Cut off your Slauson. Get back in your car and travel until you come to…” and so on.)
Carson himself once proved the power of late-night television to move a market. During a 1973 monologue, he told his audience that there was an impending toilet paper shortage. His audience took it seriously, and by the end of the next day there was a shortage on toilet paper that took three weeks to correct.
One could say that the expanded roster of news outlets, such as the Internet and cable news, plus an overall rise of consumer cynicism would prevent a similar run on any product today. But there’s another reason why it probably won’t happen again: There aren’t going to be too many pitchmen like Art Fern coming down the pipeline, and there certainly won’t be any more Johnny Carsons.
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