If you ever find yourself doing outdoor hobbies in slow motion or bursting into a full-blown musical theater scene at the office, beware: You might be in a pharmaceutical ad.
That’s the thesis of a new sketch that aired on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend, in an episode hosted by actor Jon Hamm.
The two-minute clip opens with a montage of the aforementioned slowed-down activities—“rock climbing with a smile, kayaking with your significant other, hiking with your interracial friends,” as Hamm intones—that may indicate one is actually in a commercial for a herpes treatment, according to the host.
“As we’ve learned from Valtrex commercials, these recreational activities are the No. 1 indicators of herpes infections,” Hamm continues, very seriously. “Medical science doesn’t understand why the herpes virus causes people to seek active fun in slow motion, but we know that it does.”
Next up comes a series of patient testimonials, with various “SNL” cast members playing people who found themselves engaging in slow-motion activities, often in very deliberately diverse groups, and realized from that situation—and not, say, from obvious symptoms like “painful genital sores”—that they should get tested for herpes.
But not every slow-motion activity is a sign of herpes, Hamm warns, poking fun at common tropes of other drug ads. A man may have erectile dysfunction if his wife approaches in slow motion while wearing a generic sports jersey, a parent might have depression if their child slowly shows them a drawing and, in a clear send-up of the popular promos for Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim’s Jardiance, anyone who finds themselves in a color-coordinated musical number in an office might have diabetes … “or diarrhea,” Hamm adds.
The parody commercial ends with Hamm finding himself in a slow-motion rock-climbing situation of his own, before he holds up a bottle of once-daily “Herpastopper,” getting one final dig in at pharma branding: “We tried to come up with a better name, but nobody could think of one,” he says with a sigh.
This is far from the only time that “SNL” has poked fun at pharma ads and the industry in general. Almost exactly a year ago, for example, the long-running sketch show put out another parody ad, this time selling “Ozempic for Ramadan,” with a pitch for Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 blockbuster’s appetite-suppressing effects as a helpful aid during the Islamic period of fasting.