Buck for Chegg.com

No one is better qualified to employ humor that’s so willfully tasteless as Buck. In a brood of spots for online textbook rental service, Chegg.com, Buck whets the appetite of college juvenescence by appealing to the lure of gross.

By satirizing the social life of college campus, Buck has tapped into the best (or worst) of gross-out humor by walking a tightrope between bad taste and charm. In fraternizing comical abnormality and sophomoric platitudes, the campaign owes a cultural debt to films like Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, who today, are considered fathers to this vile genre of toilet comedy. For Buck, however, the resulting spots exhibit all the hallmarks of bad taste: gratuitous nudity, uncontrollable bodily functions, and a knack for vulgarity that is inspired. In this campaign, nothing is too raunchy. Raunchy is the point.

For Buck’s ongoing liaison with cel-animation, this campaign is a homecoming, and could not have come at a better time. With so many studios churning out work in the spirit of synthetic, CG polish, Buck is taking the low road to refinement and serving up a look that’s more take-out than table-service. The aesthetic is grimy: illustrative, with a nervous sense of line-work that’s both fast and loose. In tone and nerve, it’s Bucks own brand of grossploitation: disagreeable to taste and a testimony to low humor of a high order.