By now you may have seen the Garnier hair color commercial featuring Tina Fey. It's perky, it's bouncy, it's shiny, it's everything a good hair commercial should be.
But I feel uncomfortable watching it. Particularly the short version where you don't see her glasses or green converses.
I keep waiting for Tina to make some sarcastic comment or crack a joke with a pop culture reference thrown in for good measure, but she never does.
And then I'm just left sitting there like, oh, maybe she just...likes this hair dye product. That's not nearly as fun. And then I feel let down. And then I feel bad for feeling let down because Tina Fey decided to do a commercial with no jokes. Like I can't just let her be a real person who happens to like nourishing hair dye and doesn't wear her glasses sometimes.
But it's not my fault Tina Fey is hilarious 99.9% of the time. She's created a precedent in my mind. I'm trained to see Tina Fey and think, Oh man. This is going to be good. Just wait. Just wait to see what funny thing she's going to say next. But in this commercial it never happens.
It's like I'm sprinting down one of those unexplained paved roads in the middle of a desert that mysteriously drops of a cliff without warning, and I'm left suspended in mid-air bicycling it like Wile E. Coyote, holding up a sign that reads "Help!" before I plummet to the ground below, landing in a cloud of dust and leaving a coyote-shaped hole in the dirt. That's what it's like to watch this commercial for me. Every time.
I think it's that Tina is hardly ever that enthusiastic about anything, at least when it comes to tone of voice, so when I hear that chipper "this hair color is AWESOME you guys. It makes my hair shiny!" and see her twirling around in a skirt, I shift in my seat and glance to my left and right like, "Am I supposed to laugh? I don't know if I'm supposed to laugh. Is this supposed to be that ironic type of funny? What's that? I think I hear the oven timer going off..."
I need someone who knows Tina well to sit beside me when I watch the commercial so I can lean over and whisper, "is this Tina Fey being serious? I can't tell. Her face is unreadable. I need to know how to react." Or maybe just hold up my Wile E. Coyote sign to her real quick so she can give me the signal and I'll know whether or not to say, "thanks Tina Fey for that informative and convincing sales pitch" or "hahaha, Tina Fey, you slay me." Is that too much to ask?
Am I over-thinking this? Almost certainly. But I've seen this commercial enough to know that this feeling isn't going to go away, and I need to know if you feel the same or if I just have too much social anxiety about people I don't even know.
So, tell me: does this commercial make you want to buy Garnier hair color or take imaginary cookies out of the oven?