There's a fine line between amused and insane

Women are not easy beasts to understand. They are lumbering, sweaty things who communicate in squeaks and titters about their need for proper-fitting underthings and how much they hate their co-workers. It is best, in my experience, to avoid contact with them whenever possible, venturing from safety only when insatiable sexual need forces you to suffer through a dinner with their parents. Only after her father soundly criticizes your choice of television programs for three hours and you have been rewarded with--let's call it "nectar"--for four minutes may you venture back into your subterranean hovel.

Like a category-5 hurricane or a Guatemalan sinkhole can occasionally remind us just how powerless we are against Nature, all women have secret maelstroms of crazy swirling in their hidden nethers, waiting to gobsmack you down into blank-eyed helplessness. "This she-mate of mine," men (and the stubblier of lesbians) often think to themselves, "is a levelheaded and intelligent companion, capable of erudite observation and pithy witticisms. Her raw, moistened sexuality is equaled only by her searing mental prowess. Why then is she bawling because I don't want to buy her a Blu-Ray copy of Ice Princess"? Back to your hovel. This is not for you to know.

But before we digress into a lousy "ain't women weird?" Bill Engvall routine (Here's one if you really feel the need. God help you if you do), I'll say that as befuddled as I am by the fairer sex, I have spent a fair amount of time around them, which is more (SO much more) than we can say about the mad men currently in charge of Laughing Cow's television campaign. To wit, I am aware--albeit only marginally, to be fair--that women cannot be brought to orgasm with cheese.

They live in a cheese-colored world, where happiness comes foil-wrapped in a wedge of toothpaste-colored fat. The women portrayed in this commercial find more pleasure in Laughing Cow snack "foods" than a scabby hooker finds in a syringe of eyeball heroin. The paroxysms of panty-melting pleasure into which this collection of dairy-crazed sows froth themselves would make Erika Kole, star of Interview With an Enema, blush with girlish modesty.

But the creative minds behind this ad didn't just stop at "Broads like cheese a lot." They couldn't. They WON'T. Variety is, after all, quite a tempting spice, and there are so many ways to misrepresent how much women like stuffing their fat faces. Why stop at one?

We have the "I'm feeling so impishly guilty about fisting three fingers of cheese into my face cave, I'm adopting an expression like my fiancé just walked in on me blowing the stripper at my bridal shower" girl.

There's the "Guess where my other hand is" girl. 

Is it just me or is this chick showing an awful lot of tit for a cracker-spread ad?

Poor thing. Her soul-crushing suburban existence has so numbed her to pleasure, the only way she can feel anything is by chafing her nub while eating cheese pretzels. From the state of her hair, looks like she's been at it all morning, too. Thus are fetishes born.

Finally, there's a woman who has abandoned all pretense of sanity and has given herself completely to the unholy demons of The Laughing Cowe.

Imagine you're at a pleasant afternoon social engagement and a woman sitting alone in a hideous chair begins rocking violently in her seat, collapsing in on herself with laughter. Along the reaction spectrum, would yours be closer to, "Fuck me standing, that must be some good cheese," or, "Does she think that cracker is telling her jokes?" In the real world, she'd be permanently hooked up to a lithium drip and only allowed to write with crayons, but here, she's just a joyful soul helpless in the face of delicious hilarity.

I don't know why Laughing Cow decided only women enjoy (according to their packaging) "light spreadable original cheese flavor wedges," (mmm) but throwing in some curd-crazy males would have been a nice gesture towards equality.

Commercials like this are so terrible on so many levels, it makes me physically winded. There's too much to notice. It's like watching a tornado uproot a mini-mall and trying to describe every piece of nail-salon debris that whings by. Sexism? Yes, we have a duffel stuffed with sexism. Ridiculous soundtrack implying that women should never, ever stop eating? Yes, and made all the worse by the fact that the original music video for the "Don't Stop" song features a woman being tied to a railroad tie and run over with a steam locomotive, which only makes psychopaths hungry for cheese, if I'm remembering Psych 101 correctly. And does the ad cap everything off with a batshit voiceover that makes as much sense as enrolling a bagful of hornets in architecture classes? Well, shall we take a quick gander?

"With only 35 calories a wedge, feel free to laugh all you want."

Huh. Really.

I laugh for a few reasons. The suffering of old and/or orthodox religious people is one, and funny things is a close runner-up. It is a fairly complicated list, so let me walk you through one salient point you may have missed: the caloric content of my snacks is nowhere on it. Even if that number were very, very small or very, very large, it would be a diverting curiosity at best, not a sidesplitting Vaudeville routine.

Unless you're this lunatic, of course.

Christ, woman. Put down the cheese before you pop an artery.

Chances I will buy Laughing Cow light spreadable original cheese flavor wedges thanks to this ad: Erika Kole also stars in Bong Water Butt Babes, FYI.