We’ve been living in the era of surprising, funny commercials ever since Ginsberg joined Sterling Draper Pryce Joan and Pete and Burt. That’s not new. And I’m sure there have been some unusual products advertised with over-the-top jokes/images/whatever. Those advertisements for deodorant directed by Tim and Eric in which you could play drums on a man’s pectoral muscles, for example, was kind of nuts. Deodorant? You mean, like, for my armpits to smell a little nicer? LET US MAKE EVERYTHING SEEM COOL BECAUSE NORMAL LIFE IS A DRAG, COOL CATS. Yesterday, though, I stumbled across a “funny” ad for PEPTO BISMOL? Has something changed? Is Pepto Bismol something different than what it used to be? Or is Pepto Bismol still the thick, chalky, disgusting-flavored medicine that you take for when you have too much diarrhea and farts in your butt? In the ad, a man gets sick while he is camping in the woods, and then an imperious sounding squirrel hidden inside some kind of tree that is also a nightclub or something hands him some Pepto Bismol. YOU KNOW, FOR HIS DIARRHEA. The whole thing is very absurd and ridiculous, and it makes me think that we may finally (FINALLY) have gone a step too far. First the ad, and then more blah blah:

GUYS. Cool it. We won. We won! Remember when we were younger and the world wasn’t cool? You had to stay up all night waiting for 120 Minutes to come on so you could finally see the new Veruca Salt video or whatever? Nothing was funny or clever or interesting. PARENTS JUST DID NOT UNDERSTAND. Nowadays, everyone gets it. They play Foxygen as the bed music on FUCKING NPR FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE. We did it. We hid in our bedrooms and cooked up schemes for making the world a cooler place and it worked so well that it has basically backfired. The world is literally too cool now. It’s hard for people to be cool now because everyone is cool, and if everyone’s cool that’s not cool. But when it comes to, like, diarrhea medication, honestly I just want a doctor in a clean white lab coat holding up a bottle of diarrhea medicine and saying, “This is medicine for your diarrhea. If you take it, you won’t have diarrhea anymore. I’m a real doctor.” And that’s IT. He doesn’t wink into the camera and start doing the HARLEM SHAKE. Remember eight years ago during the presidential election when they had YOUTUBE DEBATES and one of the questions was posed by A STOP-MOTION ANIMATED SNOWMAN? We need to chilllllll. We are not being chill. If we were a guy and cool stuff was a girl, SHE WOULD BREAK UP WITH US, because we were SUFFOCATING HER.

Good luck with your diarrhea, though. Feel better.