Ben & Jerry's Descent Into Madness

If you have something left on your bucket list that you'd like to clear up before 5 p.m., feel free to go forth and conquer for surely this is the end of the world.....Armageddon.....the end of days as prophesized in Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 24, Verse 36.

Last week, I had the great fortune to spit my cornflakes a near record 25 feet (the notoriously tough East German judge was sufficiently moved enough to give me a 9) upon reading what the marketing geniuses at Ben & Jerry's had foisted upon a slack jawed public way too blinded by visions of dairy treats to think straight. If you were lucky enough to avoid this news, stop reading immediately and toss your computer to the floor. This is your last chance.

Yes, Ben & Jerry's hailed the creation of a new ice cream flavor, a flavor whose name was destined to get mouths watering and cash registers ringing. Now available at supermarkets throughout the nation, sitting right alongside such stalwarts as Chubby Hubby and Cherry Garcia is the much anticipated and surely never to be duplicated......Schweddy Balls. Yes.....Schweddy.....Balls.

Now, I'm the furthest thing from a prude, but there's something distinctly distasteful about the thought of consuming something that sounds like the result of a two hour death march on the treadmill. If this is the best ice cream flavor title that one of the world's biggest foodmakers can concoct, what other marketing stones have been left unturned?...."Open Sore Sundae?" "Pumpkin Pus Surprise?" "Dairy & Dystentry Delight?"

Sure, Ben & Jerry's can claim that the new flavor is an hommage to a Saturday Night Live skit, but let's be serious here. Someone must have slipped Alec Baldwin a bad ice cube to convince him to appear in such a lame vignette in the first place (but then again, he was talked into starring in that horrible remake of The Getway so he might not be the best judge of cutting edge material), mixing ice cream flavors and sweaty private parts sounds like the brainchild of a marketing executive who gets off on telling fart jokes at a shareholders meeting and quite simply put, sometimes being cute is best left to giggling babies and kitty cats. More importantly, if you're going to try to mine gold in popular culture, you can select a target that doesn't harken back to 1998. What...Baskin Robbins had already put the call out to "Dawson's Creek" and "Ally McBeal"?

Ben & Jerry's spokesman Sean Greenwood assures the public that this isn't "shock marketing" but Mr. Greenwood was last seen selling snakeskin oil at a county fair in between trying to convince Pythagoras that the Earth is flat. Now I have no problem with shock marketing and have been known to indulge in it to an appalling degree, but at least I have the testicular fortitude (since we're on the subject of Schweddy Balls here) to state the obvious. This is marketing 101 - if you get enough kids giggling in the schoolyard about eating balls, nuts or whatever, you might just be able to square aways college tuition for everyone in your brood.

In closing, Mr. Greenwood assures us that, just as in the skit, "You will not be able to resist our Schweddy Balls," to which I respond....just watch me. You see, for every person racing to the cooler to satiate their desire for a mediocre sounding ice cream with a dirty name, there will be a dozen others saying, "Ya know, we haven't had Breyers in awhile....and they have a new flavor...it's called CHOCOLATE."  

Steve Boucher is a social satirist who thinks Saturday Night Live jumped the shark after Buckwheat got assassinated, that ice cream is the opiate of the masses and that some things are best left private....hence the name private parts.