15a Yippee-yi-yay

Coincidentally, Jack in the Box has a recent ad campaign that eerily sums up themes from our entire class.



This video mocks the whole cowboy theme, suggesting that myths of the American frontier are now reduced to only jokes. Yet as American Studies students, you probably realize that jokes are not trivial: jokes can be interesting windows onto cultural concerns.

I don't know about you, but after watching that video, I can't get that silly "Yippee-yah-ay" song out of my head. Ads are designed that way, of course, attempting to embed themselves in our brain, but the power of that silly cowboy song suggests that there is still some power to the American cowboy myth. We're not the 1950s generation obsessed with John Wayne and his myths, but we're not entirely free of the frontier myth either. We can't ignore it, because it's already in our heads. All we can do is analyze it.

This video features midget cowboys, partly to mock the stereotypical strong masculinity of the John Wayne myth, and perhaps even to make an American-Studies-like point about the diversity of actual cowboys. Yet I don't think this video intends to promote diversity. There are gender issues here: instead of making midgets sexy like John Wayne, the video shows them singing in unsexy chipmunks-like voices. There are also racial issues here: as far as I can tell, all the midget cowboys are white. Even in a video that questions the cowboy mystique, the myth of all-white cowboys gets reproduced.

Beyond race and gender lie other issues of production. The video is suggesting that it's funny to think that miniature burgers come from miniature cattle and miniature people. Perhaps the joke is on us, who don't really know where our burgers come from. According to the youtube commentators, cattle and prairie dogs aren't often in the same landscape: this video confuses Minnesota corn-country than with southwestern cattle-country, and therefore, the commenters declare, the video makes no sense -- as if the video were ever supposed to make factual sense. The humor of the senselessness is mocking all the Jack in the Box customers who don't truly know where their burgers come from. The Jack in the Box corporation probably doesn't want you to read Schlosser's chapters about where our burgers truly do come from, yet, ironically, this very video suggests the need for Schlosser's analysis.

The existence of miniature burgers also hints at our precarious economic times. It's a clever way for Jack in the Box to package less meat under more bun, selling us mostly puffed air. The ad distracts us from that economic point by showing us midgets semi-yodelling. That's an astoundingly clever distraction -- yet none of these points about economics, food production, environment, diversity, and race and gender represenation are ever fully buried. 

American Studies lets us think about those buried issues in this ad. American Studies aims to let you think about any piece of culture deeply. The goal of American Studies is not to ruin the joke or ruin your lunch -- though I understand how that could happen. Really, my goal is not to ruin your life but to add greater meaning to the daily culture that's all around us.

So go forth and analyze, while humming yippee-yah-ay.