You’re butting into The Simpsons and Seinfeld, you’ve got less than a minute, and you’ve gotta leave them laughing, oh yeah, and sell some beer and chocolate.

Just like Hollywood, creative commercial talent use film-speak to quickly set the stage – as in The Simpsons and Seinfeld, cultural references and visually reminiscent devices are grist to the graphic shorthand mill and used to instantly get across the desired context for the punch line.

Obviously a big part of this working relies on performance. In the Wunderbar ‘Rock Revival’ spot, where the aging rock star croaks while being interviewed (but fortunately revives to eat chocolate another day), the dazed and confused rocker, Julian Richings, along with his buddy played by Victor Ertmanis and the interviewer played by Joel Bissonnette, delivered the goods.

Leo Burnett creative director Martin Shewchuk, no stranger to comedy (he’s been behind a prodigious stream of snack and cereal-oriented funny spots), directed the ‘Rock Revival’ spot, and is therefore liable for the ensemble.

It’s one thing to be able to spot talent with potential for a paragon performance and it’s another thing to be able to deliver it. Not that the talent aren’t up to the task (this was probably a piece of cake for Richings, who is nightly playing all the characters in Through The Eyes, a one-man play in Toronto), it is, however, typically a tough slog to get consensus among the powers-that-be to include the spontaneous contributions of talent in the final spot.

Shewchuk gives the ad community kudos for being more receptive to input from talent, and then morphing it into the much-stewed and strategized-over board. ‘I think we’ve somehow developed more respect for the acting talent here in Canada. I see more people willing to let talent ad lib, both in the casting and ultimately into the shoot.’

Which is a good thing. Shewchuk says they were originally looking for a straight Spinal Tap-type performance, then Richings came along and added his own interpretation to the character.

‘What he did was bring more of an aristocratic approach to it – more like Mick Jagger than the goofy Spinal Tap guy. And there was a line we cut in that he completely ad-libbed `just for a loff’ that we thought was pretty funny.’

One thing that isn’t as evolutionary (in a positive way) is the deleterious effect of the really long days on performance.

‘There’s a lot more of a trend to try to cram it into one day,’ says Shewchuk, comparing a typical day now to the shooting skeds of five or six years ago. ‘In general, I think we’ve got to be careful about these long days, because people get tired and you can see it sometimes in their faces.’

Shewchuk says this spot is probably an exception, but the tiredness factor actually was advantageously scripted for. ‘We purposely shot it chronologically, because I knew at the end of the long day he would be getting tired, which frankly worked to our benefit in this particular spot.

‘The scene where he dies is the last thing we did, but in other cases where you want fresh-faced mom and pop, a long day can really be a problem.’

Bissonnette, who played the Wunderbar interviewer, was also one of the stars of the Labatt’s Blue ‘Canoe’ spot, wherein two explorer types are paddling through an unsettled North America, and predict great things will come out of Canada, including, beer.

This is another commercial that relies on humor, and isn’t let down by the discourse between Bissonnette and his sidekick, Jean L’Italien. MM