During Breaks in Game, Satire and Silliness

Advertising: NY Times: "Humor is an element marketers and agencies frequently use to pique viewer interest in their extravagant Super Bowl commercials, along with music, celebrity endorsers, surprise endings and anthropomorphic animals. This time, it seemed, the almost 30 advertisers that bought the 30 minutes of commercial time - at a record average price of $2.3 million for each 30 seconds - dialed up the satire, slapstick and silliness, with widely varying results.
By offering viewers a lineup largely composed of light-hearted commercials full of shtick, Madison Avenue could be saying the national mood is improving or that conditions are so bad that America needs to laugh. Or perhaps the message is nothing more complicated than the following: that there is nothing funnier than a knockout, drag-down brawl between Grandma and Grandpa over a bag of potato chips."