Are advertisers getting more creative or just more bizarre?

The Super Bowl stopped being just about football twenty years ago when Apple Computers filled a thirty-second spot during the game with a high-concept ad for their new Macintosh PC. The ad, which featured a bodacious blond woman sprinting through a grayscale dystopia with a sledgehammer (all the better to smash the giant television screen of oppression with, of course), looked and felt like a real movie had replaced the usual commercial fare.

Apple's ad raised the bar for Super Bowl commercials in 1984 and to this day we have them to thank for not only preventing a nightmarish, Orwellian future with their clunky, over-rated computers, but also for precipitating TV's chanting frogs ("Whassup") as well as the Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera, Pepsi/Coke turf-war.

Looking for a unifying theme amongst this year's Super Bowl commercials is probably futile. If the ads left viewers with any lasting impression it's simply that America has grown incredibly weird in the last few years. A thirty-second spot in Super Bowl XXXVIII cost 2.25 million dollars, and advertisers spent their money wisely by filling their 750,000 dollar per second commercials with the usual talking animals, B-list pop stars, and, uh, non-talking animals.

A good way to gauge the overall quality of the Super Bowl commercials each year is to look at the beer ads. After all, the people at Budweiser have been making creative, successful Super Bowl ads longer than anyone -- right? Their two most memorable ads for Super Bowl XXXVIII involved both animals and cartoonish sadism (the second most popular theme of the year).

In one Budweiser slot, a horse farts on a woman holding a candle, inadvertently burning her to a hilarious crisp. In another, a man trains his dog to bite people in the crotch. Reportedly, Budweiser is working on an ad for next year where a man trips on a banana peel (probably discarded by the talking monkey from this year) and falls into a wading-pool filled with mousetraps.

The mousetrap bit will have a difficult time, however, living up to this year's ad featuring a donkey who yearned to be a Budweiser Clydesdale. FedEx's creativity was also a highlight with a commercial that, for a change, didn't showcase any animals. The ad featured an alien posing as an office drone and was probably the funniest visual joke out of any Super Bowl commercial this year. H& R Block's "Willie Nelson advice doll" was funny relative to most other ads this year, as was the Simpson's Mastercard commercial.

However, this year's crowning commercial was JetBlue's. The ad didn't appear to be made by a highly paid team of advertising-executives and wasn't high-concept in the least -- no computer-generated bullet-timed talking monkeys here -- but it worked. A father, dressed in pilot-uniform, meets his cute red-headed son at the door. Cute kid talks dad's ear off about how he wants to fly planes just like him and work for JetBlue. Dad tells son that he doesn't fly for JetBlue. The son, looking confused for a second, quickly retorts, "No wonder mom left!" and runs back inside the house.

In the department of unintentionally funny ads, there was the unveiling of Detroit's newest cars, all of which have mythic, vaguely-Spanish sounding names and come in bright primary colors. One looks like a mini-van chopped in half height-wise and another like a wider, pancake-shaped convertible. The cars look funny enough on their own but zooming through the desert doing mach 10, they somehow appear even more ridiculous.

The most absurd commercial of them all was Gillette's, which managed to compare shaving to sex, rock and roll, scoring a winning goal, space travel, "having an angel by your side," and running with the bulls, all in a scant thirty seconds. Well done.

New to Super Bowl commercials this year were two companies advertising their erectile dysfunction drugs, Cialis and Levitra. Levitra's ad started out warm and sunny before turning nightmarish with a warning that if "your erection persists for more than four hours please seek medical attention."

This was also the year of the special interest Super Bowl commercial. The anti-drug and anti-smoking ads, which prominently featured children drowning or strung-out, reminded us in between drinking beer, eating fatty foods, and watching Cedric the Entertainer get a bikini wax that, indeed, "we cannot rewind life". Truth.org compared cigarettes to "Shards of Glass Freeze Pops," and Philip Morris USA, cigarette-manufacturer, told kids not to smoke. Approximately ten o'clock eastern-time, irony passed away quietly.

All jokes aside, nothing that appeared during commercial-breaks could rival the ludicrousness of the Super Bowl's own pre-game and halftime shows. Someone in an astronaut costume walked on a model the lunar surface as a tribute to the space shuttle Columbia (which was never going to the moon in the first place), soldiers in Baghdad took a live "freedom break" via satellite, helicopters flew overhead, barely-relevant pop stars lip-synched songs they made popular years ago, Kid Rock wore an American flag poncho, and the show came to an abrupt end when Janet Jackson bared a boob. The commercials resumed. We laughed. We cried. We eagerly await next year.