Casting Comedy Commercials Is Serious Business
Drama is at the heart of comedy.
I love casting comedy commercials. Over the years I have been in the room to work with many talented comedic actors and learned lessons from watching the choices they made after I gave a note of direction. I’ve also been fortunate enough to see firsthand how some of the best comedy directors approach casting, and I’ve witnessed their process of bringing the comedy of those commercials to life in the callback.
When asked about the highlights of my career, I regularly fall back on the opportunity I had to sit next to the Coen Brothers during callbacks for a Mercedes Super Bowl commercial, and I watched how they worked with the actors to magically squeeze humor out of seemingly mundane moments. Another well-known commercial director spends most of his time in callbacks directing the actors to make their performances smaller and smaller until the actors hardly feel like they are performing at all. The common throughline that emerges from these experiences is that directors don’t want you to be funny. They want you to be real. They want you to be true to the character you are portraying, and if you can do that, then the comedy of the situation will naturally emerge.
Commercials often have an absurd premise to prove a point about the product, but the point is always the same – There’s a problem, and the product solves the problem. That’s why we need the product in our lives. For this logic to work, the characters in the spot must be completely relatable. We have to identify with them. We have to recognize them as ourselves, our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, or our family members. The most effective way to make these characters relatable is to ground them in reality. Whether you are auditioning for the hero of the spot (the person who uses the product), the foil of the spot (the person who does not use the product and possibly uses a competing product), or a secondary observer (someone who does not use the product but learns about why they should), you should plan to ground your performance in reality.
I’ve seen many great standup comics, sketch comedians, and improvisers who can kill it on the stage tank in the audition simply because they are trying so hard to show how funny they are instead of staying true to the scene. If you’re given the opportunity to improvise in an audition, be sure to do so within the paradigm of the world of that commercial. In other words, any “yes-and-ing” you do to add new information to the scene should be relevant to the world of the commercial and should help develop your character’s relationship with the product. Think of the iconic scene from When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan’s Sally pretends to have the big O in a crowded diner, and the woman at the next table says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” The scene very well could’ve been a commercial for Sally’s sandwich, and many commercials have borrowed this bit (in a more G-rated form) in the decades since. The line, “I’ll have what she’s having” lands so well not because of its punchy humor or clever phrasing. The line itself is very plain and straight forward, and that’s what makes the moment so funny.
Of course, there are always exceptions, so be sure to look out for them in the form of direction you might receive in a live audition or the instructions you receive for a self-taped one. Unless there’s anything to indicate in the instructions that the casting director wants a more over-the-top or cartoony performance, as you’re trying to decide which takes to submit for your self-taped audition, go with the ones that seem the most grounded in reality and remember this: The most common mistake an actor can make when auditioning for a comedic commercial is to try to be funny. Sometimes the more serious you are, the funnier the material becomes, and that’s how you can make your audition seriously funny. Seriously.