Goulet!

It's been out for a couple months, but I so love that Emerald Nuts commercial with Robert Goulet. It's the one with the legend that in the afternoon when your energy is low at work, Robert Goulet shows up and messes with your stuff. But if you eat Emerald Nuts, the story goes, you will keep Robert Goulet at bay. For a little while anyway.

It is perfect that Robert Goulet would, as a much-older man than the Grecian formula belies, be in such a delightfully fun and totally brilliant commercial. It connects his schlocky lounge singer persona with roles in goofy comedy classics from my youth, like Beetlejuice and The Naked Gun.

Emerald Nuts is a coda on a decades-long career the silliness of which is tolerable only because of the self-consciousness of Goulet of his Goulet-ness. It's just like William Shatner, I'd say. And even he has a Priceline commercial which is nothing short of Shat-tastic.

Goulet and Shatner are pop culture standards, culturally significant, and clearly still relevant on some level. Their success is based on their silliness, which must always be played straight-faced, as that's the heart of the humor. For these guys, serious doesn't work quite the way that silly through the serious does.

And maybe that's what sticks with my generation. It's the little tension between them, like when your normally sober grandfather is sudden funny. And there are some really funny and creative people in advertising right now who get it. They're the same bastards who seduced me with Citibank and Mac. But beyond that, I love being a part of a generation with a sense of humor and wide, deep, and broad love and curiosity and respect not only for other cultures, but for our own history and culture as well. That's what it is. Goulet and Shatner are part of our common experience as Americans in this generation, so we get it.

And of course, it worked because now I know the product too. Ah, how the wheels continue to spin.