Behold an early 1980s commercial for a local Los Angeles business ‘Gary’s Mattress’, located in Van Nuys, California. Gary, spokesman for his own store, manages to squeeze more offensive stereotypes into less than a minute than…well, I wish had a slick and amusing comparison to make but I just don’t. In some ways, it’s not so much the racial stereotyping that’s offensive as it is the groups that were left out; no Black or Jewish or Nazi jokes? What, they’re not good enough for you, Gary? One might be tempted to ‘read’ this commercial as a commentary on the casual racism still prevalent in pop culture of the time. Perhaps it’s ‘self-reflexive’, a method of holding the mirror up to life and testing the viewers own tolerance for racial stereotyping. But then you get to the end of the commercial, where Gary espouses animal cruelty, and you’re brought back to earth. Gary wasn’t a bad guy, he was a guy with a sick sense of humor who perhaps thought the shock of his comedy would earn him customers. The crappy production values only heighten the weirdness of the whole concept and make it even funnier. I checked and didn’t find a ‘Gary Mattresses’ in business in Van Nuys. I have to assume he moved on, a victim of the decline of sick humor, to say nothing of the decline of Van Nuys, California.