Super Bowl advertisements

There was a fine crop of ads on the Super Bowl this year.

There were a few, though, that were pretty lame. I think in this connection of "MacGruber," which was a warmed-over version of an old Saturday-Night-Live parody of the even older sitcom MacGyver. You might as well parody the Dick van Dyke show at this point!

I also wasn't especially impressed by an over-produced ad in which a bunch of bugs steal the coca-cola from a sleeping picnicker. "Gee, look what we can do with computer generated imagery!" Wow, Wally.

But there were lots of good ones. I'll list my favorite three in ascending order.

The Clydesdale in love. He rescues his gal, a trick pony in a circus, and they run off into the surrounding woods together. The idea is funny, its timing in the wake of the merger of Anheuser-Busch into a European beer company makes it funnier, and the sound track was Marvin Gaye singing "Ain't no Mountain High Enough," which is a classic.

But even better: The Career Builder "Its' Time" commercial. Ways to know that you hate your job enough to be looking for a better one. This is a classic use classic use of repetition and variation, that included neat non sequiturs like a punch in the face of a koala.

Best of all, my personal favorite ... the Conan O'Brien promo in which we (and apparently everyone in Times Square) witness a commercial that was only supposed to have been seen in Sweden. THAT was hysterical.