SPAM: An Exegesis

Spammed and Damned

"What's that sizzling sound I hear?" the husband asks. Any rational person would assume the answer is "Bacon!", and wonder why he even bothered to ask. But Hubby clearly knows his wife, and I suspect the question is posed more in a tone of dread than anticipation. The best possible reply he can hope for is, "A grease fire. RUN!" But no, she says eight little words which, if they must be spoken, should never be shouted out with glee: "Get up! It's SPAM and eggs, my dear!"

Sensibly, they choose not to show us Hubby's response (I can only imagine he rolled over with a muttered, "I thought I left a wake-up call for half past divorce," but by this point the odor of unfertilized poultry ova and fried swine jowls must be impregnating the knotty pine paneling, so he might as well get up and try to dull his olfactory sense by igniting the first of many Old Golds.

But enough of his problems! What about the known side effects of SPAM, such as homicide, and involuntary rhyming? Look at that woman in the middle left box:

She asks a leading, but reasonable question, "How can I cook without much fuss?" To which her husband screams the non sequitur, "SPAM bake would tickle all of us!" At first, you might just assume her husband was insane, and move on with your life. But if you have no life, you might do one of those "enlarge and enhance" things they do on TV procedurals, and reveal that the mouths of Hubby and the children are all frozen in mirthless grins, like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. The son appears to be screaming in terror, but his dead eyes, gazing listlessly into the void, suggests that he accepted the inevitability of death a millisecond before the cleaver struck him down. Sister's eyes, popped wide and rolled to the side, suggest Mother was listening to Eddie Cantor on the radio as she taxidermied her daughter, while Father's fixed look of agonized servility is perfect for a corpse whose killer imagines him so eager to ingratiate himself that he seconds her menu-related musings in rhyme. But a crappy rhyme, of course, because he's no better as a dead poet than he was as a husband and provider, which is why Mother keeps her cutlery collection buried in his back. Oh, a bit of sawdust trickles out when she withdraws the butcher knife, but at least the bastard is finally helping around the kitchen.

The ladies in the middle right box appear to be alive at least, but not only are they also speaking in rhyme, they're speaking in code as well.

Lady #1 says, "Here's a lunch that's good and quick..." to which Lady #2 replies, "Hot cheese SPAMwich does the trick!" Which clearly it does not. But despite their effort to throw gossips off the trail by randomly inserting nonsense words like "cheese SPAMwich," it's obvious from the context, i.e., the words "lunch", "quick", and "trick", that one of these ladies had a nooner at the Mayflower Hotel with Roger Sterling.

Finally, we're left with the main message of the ad: "Look at all the fun you can have with SPAM, the Hormel meat of many uses." Just imagine if Joseph, instead of his storied coat of many colors, had sported outerwear fashioned from reprocessed pork remnants. While it probably wouldn't have hindered his ability to interpret Pharaoh's dreams, I bet he would have spent a lot more of his free time getting treed by jackals.