Ray Liotta's KFC Commercial is a Cracked Masterpiece of Anti-Comedy
I have been thinking a lot about Ray Liotta since he died in his sleep recently at sixty-seven. I’m planning on making July Ray Liotta Month here at the Happy Place and I’ve got another blog post about the actor’s curious cult and iconic status on the way.
While researching that upcoming blog post about how Liotta was more than just an actor I visited Youtube to check out the actor’s commercials. I knew that Liotta was the spokesman for 1800 Tequila and made ads for Heineken beer and Chantix.
Until I Googled “Ray Liotta” and “commercials” I did not realize, however, that the famously intense thespian would follow in the footsteps of Darrell Hammond, Norm Macdonald, Jim Gaffigan, George Hamilton, Rob Riggle, Billy Zane and wrestler Dolph Ziggler and play Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Sanders in a tongue-in-cheek commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I was surprised because I’d always assumed that Colonel Sanders was played by comedians and while Liotta has a good sense of humor and is willing, even eager ,to poke fun at himself and his image he is most assuredly not a stand-up comedian or professional funnyman. Far from it.
There are many surprising elements to Liotta’s stint as a legendary fried chicken magnate above and beyond the Goodfellas star playing a Kentucky Colonel in a commercial for fast food.
For starters Liotta is unrecognizable as Colonel Sanders. The dark and brooding gangster movie icon is a vision in white: white suit, white shirt, white hair and white beard.
The quintessential East Coaster has a gentlemanly Southern accent and impeccable manners to boot. At least that’s how things start out. Then they take a take a wonderfully Ray Liotta turn.
“Howdy folks! I’m here to tell you about KFC’s Honey Mustard Barbecue Georgia Gold!” Liotta-as-the-Colonel cheerfully begins.
Only five seconds in, shit gets real. The good Colonel is then angrily confronted by his doppelgänger, the bad Colonel, or at least the Intense Colonel, who angrily demands that he instead talk about Nashville Hot style KFC.
The bad Colonel invests a shocking amount of anger and intensity into the words he pronounced NASH-ville HOT. This is no typical KFC commercial. It is a dark night of the soul for the Colonel as he confronts the ugliness within and a side of himself that represents both the spicy deliciousness of Nashville Hot style fried chicken and the flames of hell.
The good Colonel threatens to wash his internal nemesis’ mouth out with tangy chicken and the commercial quickly spirals into madness.
The good Colonel has clearly lost his mind. He’s no longer merely arguing with himself and his evil, demonic, Nashville Hot side, he’s arguing with inanimate sculptures of himself that have become sentient and joined the furious debate as to the relative virtues of Nashville Hot and Honey Mustard Barbecue Georgia Gold.
Holding a plate of Nashville Gold and Honey Mustard Barbecue Georgia Gold in each hand, the conflicted Colonel rages, “What have I become?!?!?!?!?!” in a frenzy of existential terror.
You might think that things could not get any creepier or weirder at this point. You would be wrong.
The last twenty seconds of the commercial consist of Liotta as Colonel Sanders alternating between a forced smile and a very Ray Liotta glare of infinite murderous intensity.
The commercial only last fifty seconds but good lord does it ever take you on a journey.
It’s a cracked masterpiece of Adult Swim-style anti-comedy as well as a beautiful illustration of the cracked intensity Liotta brought to everything he did, even something as silly as playing a tormented fast food giant in a commercial.
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