Awee Scottish brogue is money in the bank
Every time you turn on the TV these days there’s some Scottish guy yelling his head off.
There’s the Keith’s beer commercial, in which some pansy desecrates his beer by putting a wedge of lime into the mouth of the bottle, whereupon a muttonchopped, kilt-wearing roughneck materializes and removes the offending citrus with a pair of tongs, his Scottish brogue screeching, “Oh, it burns, it burns.”
Then he shows up again just as two blokes clink a couple of Keith’s beer bottles together, to lecture them about treating the beer with respect. “ And don’t go plunking it on the head like it’s a piñata. Now, grab that napkin and make a wee neck brace.”
In an ad for Money Mart, a kilted Scot rebukes his nephew: “So, you want your good old Uncle Angus to lend you $200 until your next pay day. Well, let me tell you, in our day we’d break our backs, swept chimneys, gutted fish, pinched every penny, because the world judges a man by the size of his sporran.”
There’s also a Nutri- Grain breakfast bar featuring a tiny Scottish lawyer who argues that the new bite-sized snack is huge — bigger than he is.
In another ad, Wrigley’s has an animated stick of Scottish chewing gum chasing a young female marathoner. “Hold on lassie, long-lasting Extra makes it all the way to the finish. I’m the gum that lasts an Extra, Extra, Extra long time!”
And that’s just television. There are at least two current radio commercials — one for Scottish beers at Scottish prices, the other a Honda ad featuring a Scot named Kenny Chicane, with cars engines roaring in the background.
So what’s going on? We have Scots who yell, who are angry, who are tenacious. Is this the general perception of Scots?
The connection between Keith’s and Scotland is clear. Keith’s beer is from Nova Scotia and it was Alexander Keith, an immigrant from Scotland, who founded the brewery.
Money Mart’s connection is also obvious, if hackneyed. It’s playing up the stereotype of the Scots as tightwads — though there’s a kernel of truth to it. Scotland was never a resourcerich country, and what it did have it had to make last. There was no room for wastefulness and every penny counted.
However, Barry Ringstead, Money Mart’s director of marketing, sidestepped the stereotype issue when he returned my e-mail. Uncle Angus, he explained, was simply meant to be “a likeable, memorable character” and the ad itself a “humorous over-the-top depiction of an exchange between two generations who have different priorities.” He said the response has been great. “The majority of people view these ads in the lighthearted manner in which they were intended.”
Wrigley’s had much the same to say about its Extra ad. Kelly McGrail, of its consumer affairs department in Chicago, explained the gum’s accent was meant to give him personality and character and underline the fact that the gum is long-lasting and tenacious. That makes sense. If you want to attract attention, obviously, you choose a character that is vocal and animated — there aren’t too many commercials that feature Buddhist monks.
Kellogg’s declined to comment on their commercial, so the connection between their Nutri- Grain bars and Scotland isn’t clear. But the association of Scots with breakfast cereals does recall General Mills’ Oatmeal Crisp commercial of the mid-1990s, which featured another bellowing Scot — played by Englishman Nigel Bennet — shouting “ BUT IT’S NOT OATMEAL!” And it’s true. The Scots did eat a lot of oatmeal so perhaps they favour breakfast bars, too.
Still, it’s odd, isn’t it, to use a national group in today’s climate of political correctness? But perhaps the truth is that the Scots are one of the few groups we can safely poke fun at. In Canada, they are neither a minority nor insecure. They were among the first Europeans here. They explored, built, plowed, farmed, fought Canada’s wars and laid out its roads. In the early years, they dominated the socioand political scene in the northern dominion. Our first two prime ministers, Sir John A. Macdonald and Alexander Mackenzie, were Scots. (Last but not least, the characters in the ads are white, male and English speaking — a safe target for a joke.)
But the yelling is strange, the Scottish having no reputation for being a particularly stentorian people. Perhaps this is a case of an evolving cultural stereotype. There is the obstreperous Scot of the Mike Myers films — viz., Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies. And Shrek, too, has a Scottish accent and a somewhat irascible mien. In the cult film So I Married an Axe Murderer, the father, Stewart McKenzie, rails against the Pope, the Queen, the Rothschilds, the Gettys, even Colonel Sanders. And even earlier, on Saturday Night Live, Myers played a crazed character who worked at All Things Scottish, whose motto is, “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap.” Possibly even Braveheart’s depiction of fighting against the English evokes an image of a bellicose and angry nation.
So the bottom line is that the Scots are on the airwaves because they are an advertiser’s dream: clownish characters are a hit, they’re safe to poke fun at — and they have a memorable accent to boot.
Weekend Post