Australia Investigates Red M&Ms Bullying Tactics and Its Effect On Children. No, Seriously.

With the world falling apart, it’s good to know that there is a group of people in this crazy place called Earth that spent two months “investigating the social interactions on talking M&Ms in commercials”, as this article from Australia’s News.com.au points out.

Australia’s Advertising Standards Bureau recently conducted a two month study to decide whether or not the antics of the red M&M corrupts children’s minds with his vicious bullying of his M&M underlings. Namely, the yellow peanut M&M.

This is good to hear, because I plan on teaching my children about life through the harsh reality portrayed in commercials; particularly in ads featuring anthropomorphic candy. Because as a piece of anthropomorphic candy, my kid will see a little something of himself in that walking spheroid husk filled with chocolaty vital organs. And who is the mother of my candy child?

She’s got a sweet pussy.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, even though we Americans really like to bitch and complain about the most frivolous of subjects, not a single American ever once watched an M&Ms commercial in the past decade and felt the yellow peanut M&M was being disenfranchised by the red M&M. Besides, M&M’s have that hard outer shell protects them from emotional harm. And even if the red M&M were bullying the yellow M&M, it’s simply because he’s jealous that the yellow M&M, at his core, is more emotionally well-equipped due to his strong-willed peanut-y center, while the red M&M is filled only with chocolate – just hallow and empty inside. There’s no substance to him; no nutrition. Therefore, he acts out aggressively because he recognizes that the yellow M&M is just a better, more well-adjusted candy than he is, with much less emotional baggage and saturated fats.

After two months of deliberation, the board came to the conclusion that the M&M ads were “humorous rather than bullying”. Here’s the thing: nothing is humorous after two-months of exhaustive research, deliberation, and analysis. What’s really astounding is that the bureau found those commercials funny after watching them repeatedly for two months, while the rest of us are struggling to figure out if they’re funny after one viewing.

After two-months of watching commercials featuring talking chocolate, the only thing the Advertising Standards Bureau found funny were the hallucinations they experienced after having been driven mad by watching commercials featuring talking chocolate for two-months – and then having to make pie charts and line graphs out of it showing the correlation between M&M sales among children and hate crimes committed by children, as these kinds of governmental boards tend to do. A joke stops being funny the moment a government bureaucrat wrangles a team of experts to have deep discussions about the true, underlying intentions of the red M&M when he coercions the yellow M&M into participating in another one of his silly schemes.

Ultimately, the blame can’t be fully placed upon the shoulders of an Australian government bureau. They were merely investigating a series of complaints from Australian citizens, who felt the ads may promote bullying. Now, I don’t know much about Australia’s government, other than the fact that there’s a strong possibility they might actually have one; but hearing about a news story like this isn’t surprising when you consider this line towards the end of the same News.come.au article I linked to above:

In another complaint lodged with the ASB, a viewer objected to a Boost chocolate bar being “naked” as it did not have its “wrapper” on.

One can argue that the Australian government is wasting their time with this, but that would be false. This is the Advertising Standards Bureau’s job. They can’t have an opinion on what to do about collapsing global economies because all of their ideas would relate to giving the economy a snazzy, memorable theme song and telling you that the economy is the number-one rated economy in crash tests four years in a row, according to J.D. Power and Associates. So this kind of thing is what the ASB handles day-in and day-out. They read complaints from citizens about how a cartoon chocolate bar isn’t wearing pants, or about how a hard-shelled candy might be bullying other hard-shelled candies, and then they drink and snort everything in sight to wash away their ever-growing existential sense of profound, sugary pointlessness. The true idiots here are those few but apparently very bored and vocal citizens of Australia that have nothing better to do than to watch commercials and get offended by anthropomorphic candy.

Seeing as this is the case, I urge the Nabisco cookie company to not export their newest mascot, Rupert the Curmudgeon Cookie.

They’re going to hate him.