Chris Farley: Dead Man Selling

It’s been on for a few weeks now, but I find myself doing a double take each time I see the DirecTV commercial featuring the late comedian Chris Farley. Here it is, if you haven’t seen it. It’s one of a series of commercials by the satellite tv provider that takes scenes from old movies, with the original actors, but changes the dialog so that the characters are talking about DirecTV. It’s a novel idea, I guess—I saw one today with Dana Carvey and Kim Basinger, in an altered scene from “Wayne’s World”—but I just don’t know about using an actor who is, you know, dead, from semi-tragic causes (Farley, a hard, hard partier, died of a drug overdose in 1997).

I loved Chris Farley, and I loved “Tommy Boy,” the comic guy road movie where Farley teamed up with fellow SNL cast member David Spade. It’s a movie all dudes love, and most women hate, so it’s got that going for it, and I watch it whenever it pops up on television. So my objection is not from an “artistic” standpoint (boy, my wife is going to laugh when she reads that). It might be that in the commercial, it’s Spade’s lines that are reworked to make it an advertisement. Farley, of course, no longer being among the living, couldn’t redo his lines without some sort of special effects, and it just feels exploitive to me. Using his image like that, from a film that was the high point of his movie career… it seems like he needed to be here to sign off on it.

I realize that Farley’s estate must have approved of the spot. But he died without any children or dependents, so who, exactly is benefiting from this? His parents? Siblings? Ewww. As for David Spade, he was asked about the questionable taste of the commercial.. here’s his answer. He said his old friend would have loved the idea, and perhaps he’s right. But since we’ll never know—since we can’t know—maybe even having to speculate about it is proof enough that it was wrong.