Humor can be a funny thing

What message are companies sending by heralding customers for bad behavior?

Earlier this year, a national mattress company began running television advertisements that featured bad behavior in public being questioned with “How do you sleep at night?” The answer each time by the provocateur is that they sleep just fine on a specific type of mattress they just bought at the national chain of mattress stores.

One mattress ad features a grandson and his Nana as she regales him with stories of how she posts a photo of a much younger woman wearing a bathing suit as her photo on dating apps, claiming that she even has received gift cards from potential suitors in response.

Another mattress ad features a heavily muscled man working out at a gym getting up from the workout bench and offering the sweat-laden bench to a waiting woman without making an effort to towel off the bench.

Still another mattress ad shows a man in an aisle seat taking off his shoes and socks on an airplane and then putting his feet up on the armrest of the woman seated in front of him.

Two sporting game mascots in yet another mattress ad taunt one another at a sporting event but one proceeds to get overly physical and continues to push the other mascot until he falls and his mascot head falls off.

There are more. One involves a woman heckling a grade school basketball player much to the horror of others sitting in the gymnasium stands. She looks particularly happy at her efforts.

Presumably, the advertisements are meant to be amusing. But what’s the joke here? That the mattress chain applauds antisocial behavior as long as the miscreants are loyal customers? Or is the message that sleeping on one of the firm’s mattresses results in being comfortable acting like a jerk in public?

We’ve seen (and called out) companies in the past that have tried to use humor by pointing out customers thinking they are stealing rather than getting a good buy or belittling a family member at a fast-food joint for not being the favorite. But here in these mattress store ads, the humor seems to reside in applauding bad behavior.

Yes, I get it. They are trying to do a play on the well-worn question we ask someone who engages in questionable behavior: “How do you sleep at night?” Is the company trying to suggest that others who engage in bad behavior might toss and turn at night unless they sleep on its mattresses?

There’s long been a simplistic test for ethical behavior that suggests if you can’t sleep at night because of some action you took, that’s an indication you behaved unethically. Variations of this are the mirror test or the front-page-of-the-newspaper test where you ask yourself how you’d feel about looking at each after doing something questionable. These tests are no guarantee of behaving ethically since it’s quite likely that despots and tyrants toss and turn while altruistic philanthropists have the occasional rough night’s sleep.

If the company wanted to send the message that people sleep well at night on mattresses bought from it, then the right thing might be to do that in a way that doesn’t promote acting like a jerk. If the company wants to be funny about it, then perhaps it should hire better writers. Humor can be a funny thing.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

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