Last night on the Oscars, I saw a new ad for MetLife with some of the Peanuts gang in a conference room at what I am assuming is supposed to be the MetLife building (formerly the Pan Am building) in New York. So some corporate drone meets with them and tells them that they are now offering life insurance for as little as $14.00 per month. Well, Lucy is not impressed, and she says it ought to be five cents. And then Charlie Brown agrees that it should be five cents also. (But if you know the Peanuts universe very well, you know Charlie Brown is always wrong about everything, and he never gets his own way in anything.) But then the guy says it can’t be five cents, and Lucy then demands that it must be five cents. (This guy must not be very familiar with Lucy van Pelt! You don’t win an argument with her!)
Look, I am very well-versed in the Peanuts comics and TV specials, and so I already know you can’t defeat Lucy with information, contradiction, perseverance, logic, etc. This guy has no idea what he’s getting himself into! If I were that guy at MetLife, I would simply agree with her, and say: “Fine, we’ll have a life insurance policy for five cents. But it will only pay out five cents, too. Okay?” And then Lucy would probably agree, seeing as how these characters are obviously stuck in the 1950s or 1960s, seeing as how they have not aged one iota since the 1960s. So they’re apparently stuck in a time warp, where five cents is still worth something. So fine, for cartoon characters who are ageless children, MetLife should agree to have a term life insurance policy that only costs five cents: not per month, just five cents for the whole thing. That should cost them nothing, since cartoon children do not require life insurance. But even if they somehow get written out of the comics or something, or they die of some fictional disease or accident, MetLife will still only have to pay out a nickel anyway, and they could probably just draw one, so what’s the difference?
But it’s a better policy (and they should know something about policies, being an insurer!) just to simply agree with Lucy whenever there is a disagreement, no matter what it’s about. She’s in charge of so much stuff with so many people anyway, she’ll probably forget what she made you agree to, so it won’t matter in any case. But look, MetLife has to understand something here: if Lucy can provide psychiatric treatment for five cents, especially with those ridiculously exorbitant malpractice rates, and with the threat of government fines for not strictly adhering to Obamacare’s mandates and persnickety regulations to the letter (she is also taking the same chance kids who try to set up lemonade stands nowadays face: a $50 fine, plus other red tape from local government and heat and harassment from the police, as well as a good humiliating on the local news channels and perhaps even a propaganda segment about government overreach on Stossel), then they certainly can create a life insurance policy for fictional characters that only charges five cents and only pays out five cents. Maybe they could even agree to pay out more, so long as they’re allowed to draw cartoon money to pay out, rather than use actual currency.
But what about cartoonist insurance fraud? They could pretend to kill off characters just to collect on their life insurance policies, and then just bring them back to life whenever they wanted to! So then there has to be a new government agency to look into cartoon insurance fraud! But maybe it could be run by cartoon characters we could pay in cartoon money, so it would be free! It could be led by The Inspector (from the Pink Panther cartoons), and that Irish policeman from the Bugs Bunny gangster cartoons (“You might, rabbit, you might!”). I’m sure they’d get to the bottom of whatever criminal cartoon corruption is clogging up the court system! (And if that didn’t work, we could get Daffy Duck as Dorlock Holmes in Deduce, You Say to untangle that web of criminal cartoon con-artistry!)
Or else, perhaps MetLife could learn some magical way to snap their fingers and have all the Peanuts characters age normally, as though they were real people. Then, all of a sudden, they would all be 60 years-old, and they’d instantly understand how little five cents actually buys! And with Social Security insolvent, they would suddenly be reasonable about insurance rates and payouts. But the joke’s on them, for MetLife will still pay out in cartoon money they can just draw, so it doesn’t cost them a dime, never mind a nickel!
Now I’m just waiting for someone to use The Far Side characters in contemporary TV advertising!
Here’s the argumentative ad:
Here is Dorlock Holmes, for those who aren’t familiar with him, but it’s in French, to make it fun for those who already do know him:
