Lawyers, Chairs and Hyundais

Abraham Lincoln once said, “A lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.”  I have to wonder what Mr. Lincoln would have thought of a lawyer who appears on television doing his own commercials.  Judging by the ones I’ve seen it’s a wonder any plaintiff gets a penny in a lawsuit against a corporation with these mannequins representing them.

Wooden doesn’t begin to describe the way your average personal injury attorney (read ambulance chaser) comes across.  These people generally make the late “Old Man of the Mountains” seem downright engaging on a comparative personality scale.  And at least one lawyer that I can think of, although I can’t remember her name at the moment, looks like she’s making a hostage tape.  That deer-in-the-headlights, fixed-on-the-camera gaze makes me wonder if she was able to break free from her captors and escape from the studio.

But lawyers aren’t the only ones doing their own commercials.  Unfortunately.

It would appear that somewhere along the way somebody passed a law requiring the owners of furniture stores to do their own commercials and, whenever possible, do them badly.  It started with radio commercials by Elliot and Barry of Jordan’s Furniture and, as these things go, they weren’t that bad.  There actually was something about their not quite professional approach that helped them to stick out during the interminable commercial clusters that have become a part of radio.  Eventually they moved over to television and, since they were successful, people started imitating them.