Rowntree's Randoms: 'Sunday League Coach'

 

[A review I wrote way back in 2010 which I thought I'd lost but recently rediscovered!]

(Agency: JWT London; Air date: 05/06/09; Length: 30 seconds)

Transcription:

‘What the crocodile hat was that?! There's no post-box, there's no shuttlecock, and where's the jelly giraffe, hey? Every time their fruity acorn gets that alarm clock, I want you to snowflake their teapot. Ahh. You get out there, and you play your palm trees off!’

I have a sneaking suspicion that someone working at JWT London, the advertising agency behind the new Rowntree’s Randoms advertisements, studied generative linguistics at some point. This field of linguistic study grew out of Noam Chomsky’s pioneering work since the 1950s, starting with his groundbreaking Syntactic Structures (1955). I believe this is the case because the advert, in which a Sunday league football coach gives his team a very unusual team talk, revels in playing with nonsense sentences that can, as Chomsky assured us, be perfectly grammatical. To illustrate his point, Chomsky coined the phrase ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.’ As any native speaker of English can see, the sentence is complete and utter nonsense: ideas cannot be colourless and green at the same time; indeed, ideas do not have a colour at all. To ‘sleep furiously’ is equally absurd. However, every layperson knows implicitly (and every person lucky enough to study linguistics should know explicitly) that the sentence is ‘well-formed’, meaning it is grammatically correct. The words in the sentence correspond to ‘Adjective – adjective – noun – verb – adverb’, and the pattern that they are in is perfectly acceptable. The very same rule applies to the sentences above, spoken by the irate football coach to the bewilderment of his team and the amusement of the viewer/listener. 

Often, good comedy comes from playing with language – Chris Morris and his many comedic endeavours come immediately to mind – and this advert succeeds in making us laugh by replacing sensible words with absurd, ridiculous and, well, random words (which happen to correspond to the shapes of the fruit gums being advertised), turning the coach’s instructions into a bizarre rant. The dialogue is helped by the coach’s skillful acting, depicting incredulity, frustration, and just a hint of madness, and the players’ baffled responses. Nonsense words and sentences are such a rich source of comedy because as humans, many of us enjoy the jolt of being surprised by an unexpected word out of context, even more so if it conjures up a ridiculous or humorous image in the mind. When writing his seminal Syntactic Structures, Chomsky described a strategy that would be mined for its comedic potential, by comedians and advertisers alike, for many years to come.