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Call me stupid. Go ahead. TV commercials do.

Not directly, of course; they have more subtle ways of impugning my intelligence. Understand that I have had my intelligence impugned by other than TV ad writers… OK, mainly by my wife. But at least I can talk back to her, as opposed to yelling in indignation at 42 diagonal inches of flat glass, which makes me appear... unintelligent.

We know that commercials themselves are usually inane, as are most of the programs they support. There are a few clever commercials -- we all have our favorites; one of mine involves a gecko -- but for the most part, the ads are mindless. They are not randomly mindless, however. There are rules:

* Beautiful people are smarter than ugly people.
* Young people are smarter than old people.
* Children are smarter than parents.
* Trainees are smarter than the chairman of the board.
* Women, children, and family pets are smarter than Dad.
* Celebrity athletes are smarter than anybody (provided they can read the teleprompter.)

Since pretty much all commercials conform to these rules, there are too many to list as examples, but my current least-favorite ones are those that show people behaving like idiots to get our attention and somehow convince us that their silly behavior is reason to buy the product. A frequent example is the jerky-dancing ad. Take a bunch of ordinary-looking citizens, always young, and make them dance spastically -- arms, legs, knees, and elbows flapping as if they are not real people, but string puppets operated by a puppeteer frantically brushing an invasion of red ants off his arms. Watching them sure makes me want to toss the remote on the couch and run out to buy whatever it is they're selling -- as long as it's not dance lessons.

Because the ad writers have established in their minds that their audience consists of gullible halfwits, they add further insult by presuming to teach us to happily waste their product while using it, so we will have to restock more often. Shaving gel is a good example. Not the shaving foam that bursts out of the can all cloudlike and puffy, but the toothpaste-like gel that expands into a rich lather only when you rub it on your face or legs or whatever.

A glob of this gel smaller than a lima bean puffs up into enough foam to generously cover any face, but the commercial shows a handsome young man, who doesn't need a shave, and is barely old enough to handle a razor, dispensing a golf-ball size mass of the stuff into his open palm. That much gel will generate enough foam to shave the hide of a wooly mammoth. I am not exaggerating. In fact, I am so sure of this that if anyone ever finds a wooly mammoth frozen in ice and dares me to shave it, I will limit myself to that much gel.

And as long as we're talking about grooming extinct beasts, the makers of toothpaste commercials are also guilty of the over-use technique. In their case, they show a toothbrush loaded with a fat layer of paste running the length of the bristles and part way back -- enough paste to remove the scale from both of that mammoth's 12-foot curled-up tusks and freshen its breath besides. I believe that if those animals could have been that well shaved and tooth-brushed on a Pleistocene Saturday night, they wouldn't be extinct today.

Of course, the underlying theme of most TV ads these days is that adult men are helpless morons. They can't be trusted to make a decision without the help of a wife, girlfriend, son, or daughter. Even the family pet knows better than Dad.

Dad: "Oh, boy, look at all these credit card offers I got in the mail! I'm going to sign up for all of them!"

Rex: "Woof! Woof woof! Wooof-woof, woof!"
Six-year-old daughter: "Right you are, Rex! Everyone knows that the only bankcard worth having is the new InsolventBank Platinum Card -- everyone except Dad, that is! What a cretin!"
Rex: "Woof!" (All laugh.)

I can hear all you women reading this saying, "Yeah, that's about the way it goes with men." Well, that's fine -- women are just getting even for all the years they were the butt of 'don't bother your pretty head' commercials. Guys, it's our turn to be the dumb ones now. Let's be brave. At least we have Victoria's Secret commercials to look forward to. To skip past everything else, we have our video recorders and our remotes. Priceless.

Bernard Jacks is a freelance humor writer living in Marlboro.