I SAW A COMMERCIAL ON LATE NIGHT TV; IT SAID, “FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SLIPCOVERS." SO I DID. AND IT WAS A LOAD OFF MY MIND. THEN THE COMMERCIAL TRIED TO SELL ME SLIPCOVERS, AND I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY WERE. – MITCH HEDBERG
What’s so funny about this? If you’ve ever had insomnia, that is, the inability to fall asleep, and you decided to watch television at 4:00 o’clock in the morning, you’ll understand at least a part of this joke. They do have the strangest weirdest , commercials on at that time of night. That’s when they have the cheapest rates. The companies that advertise during these hours know that at least a few people will be awake, watching, and hopefully buying stuff. You get a lot of sleazy infomercials too. These are commercials which pretend to be actual TV shows, frequently with older, has-been TV hosts. They can be a half-hour long or even longer. Sometimes they sell records and sometimes blenders for fruit and vegetables. But the cheesiest commercials are the plain old 30-60 second ones, like the one Mitch Hedberg is discussing. Who in the hell is going to buy slipcovers at 4:00 am? A slip cover is what you put on an easy chair or sofa when it gets too old and worn – kind of like the infomercial hosts. Instead of buying a new sofa, or reupholstering it, a slip cover is just fabric that mostly gets thrown over the junky sofa and maybe tucked in here and there to look like new, but they never fool anyone except the re-decorator. Not only is the advertising time cheaper at 4:00 am, but the commercials themselves are very low budget, frequently with an in-your-face, high powered, used car sales mentality. In the ad, the viewer is told to forget everything they know about slip covers. This is supposed to mean to forget your old impressions because they’ve got a hot new slipcover for you. But good old Mitch took the commercial literally. In other words, he followed the instructions to the letter and forgot all he knew about slip covers. Naturally if someone then talked about slip covers, we can’t expect Mitch to know what he’s talking about, can we? And THAT’s what’s so funny!
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