Super Bowl commercials 2018: Febreze is for people whose poop smells bad, which means you

We’ve all been there. One second, you’re eating chips and dipping them in a salsa boat in the shape of a football, and the next second you’re absolutely destroying the host’s bathroom, screaming like Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling a bullet out of an open wound and just going for it. Then comes the moment of reckoning. Uh oh, you’re in somebody else’s house! What a pickle! They’ll know that human waste comes out of your body, like you’re some sort of mutant!

“If only my poop didn’t stink,” you mutter through the tears.

Meet Dave, who’s poop doesn’t stink:

But he can’t say his poop doesn’t stink. He has to say his “bleep don’t stink.” For reasons. Even though we all know that he’s talking about feces. See, that’s the joke.

To be fair to the commercial, it’s well-acted. From sweet, sweet Dave with the rosewater colon to his parents to the school janitor, they take the deadpan and run with it. There aren’t many missed notes. The goal was to ride that thin line of joking and being in on the joke, like The Office, and the actors all did their part.

They can only work with so much, though. The word “bleep” isn’t funny. It’s just not. There is no scenario in which the words “poop,” “turds,” or “doody” can be replaced with “bleep” and make it funnier. When you start at the bottom, you’re setting yourself for failure. Dave seems like an earnest kid with a terrible, hilarious malady that would have made for a boring, miserable childhood. But it’s never going to be as fun as it could be if you don’t use the funniest words available.

Sadly, it probably is. While I don’t think that “bleep don’t stink” is inherently funny, we live in a Dilly Dilly world. We have always lived in a Dilly Dilly world. It doesn’t matter what you think. It matters if there are enough people who think, “Ha ha ha, they mean excrement, but they say bleep.”

Those people are legion, and this commercial will stick in their heads. People will think about that doomsday scenario, where guests are befouling their bathroom, their sanctuary, their home with strange waste, and they’ll remember to pick up an extra can of Febreze. They’ll remember to do this for years and years.

This commercial is not for us, friends. We’re the people whose bleep doesn’t stink, metaphorically, but the regular folks are going to eat this up. Maybe it will be the start of a series that will last for years. It could happen, even though the word “bleep” is inherently unfunny. Just say “poop.” It’s much funnier.

So far in our Super Bowl commercial review, we have an ad that was too scared to hit a man in the beans with a football and an ad for poop-hiding spray that’s scared to use the word “poop.” It’s not a promising start.

Poop.