So the Geico people are in talks with ABC about creating a sitcom around the caveman concept that’s been at the center of their most popular advertising campaign. As the article in Slate.com explains:
A few weeks ago, word arrived that the Geico cavemen—those Neanderthal chaps who appear in some of the car insurer’s television ads—might get their own sitcom on ABC. It’s early days, of course. (A spokesman for Geico’s ad agency told me they’re "exploring possibilities" but that "there’s a lot of room between a pilot and a show.") Can the cavemen conquer prime time?
I don’t expect that this sitcom, if it ever happens, will be very good (unlike the author of the Slate article, I think you can already see the premise wearing thin at Cavemanscrib.com, the website Geico’s created to get some extra viral marketing mileage out of his popularity). But for now, I still like the caveman enough to add him to the recently culled Mantheon and to hope that Geico and/or ABC continue to respect the integrity of what they’ve created. Because he’s not just funny and appealing, he’s funny and appealing precisely, as Jamie wrote a few months ago, by "looking like a caveman but playing a smart, sensitive guy."
And calling it "sensitivity" actually underplays how exceptional is his vulnerability to being hurt — by Geico’s callous equation of caveman-ness and stupidity — and his willingness to articulate that hurt (in the therapist’s office, at the hip party, on a CNN-like talk show). Even your average sensitive modern man — if I’m representative of such a type, which I think I am — almost always expresses his hurt as anger. Not the Geico caveman, though. As Slate puts it:
They first entered our consciousness in the autumn of 2004, in an ad that initially appears quite humdrum. "It’s so easy to use Geico.com, a caveman could do it," recites a blow-dried actor smiling into the camera. "What?" we hear off-screen. The camera pans, breaking through the fourth wall and revealing that the boom operator on this film shoot is, in fact, a caveman (wearing a backward baseball cap, as all boom operators do). Huffily dropping his boom mic to the floor, he shouts, "Not cool!" and storms off the set.
I realize it’s just a commercial, and that there are certainly all sorts of subtle patriarchal ways (why not a cavewoman?) in which the commercial is probably subverting its exoteric message of sensitivity and vulnerability, but I’m choosing to take it at face value. Geico caveman sensitive. Geico caveman popular. Geico caveman get sitcom. World a better place for men.
