But...That's A Grown-Ass Man!

What you see picture above is, by all appearances, a grown-ass man. Not a grown ass-man, as far as we know, but definitely full grown. The entire man has grown. (I hope you all have seen the clip of that Finnish comedian on Conan.) He has the sort of beard one needs a trimmer to maintain, because it's nice and full. And he has adorable little laugh lines around his eyes. In the picture above and in the video below the actor plays a man with a nice house/apartment and a really nice kitchen who somehow, inexplicably, isn't able to cook even a simple pasta dish.

What his mommy doesn't know, even though "that boy's never cooked  anything before", is that he uses Bertolli frozen products. Watch the 15-second spot below. It aired during the Super Bowl.

The ad is not targeted at worried mothers, of course, but at young men worried about looking ridiculous without their mothers. And you always target your ads up. If you want to sell stuff to pre-teens, portray high schoolers using your products. So I guess they might have picked a guy who's at least in his mid-twenties to woo seventeen-year-olds, who might not actually know how to cook pasta.

Still...what we've got here is a manifestation of that pernicious meme (in the old fashioned pre-internet sense) that portrays men as incompetent. This bungling, infantilized, ill-equipped young fool needs only to survive from leaving his mommy to finding a wifey. Bertolli can help him bridge that awkward gap of independence.

After that the young man can return to the incompetency expected of him. My video take on the commercial I post below, including what I think some normal expectations ought to be, not just for cooking, but, you know...like, for life.