The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #38: They're Dogs! And They're Playing Poker!

What exactly is the deal with those dogs playing poker anyway?

We're all familiar with the gag in the Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IV", where Homer is so unsettled by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's demented visions of canine recreation that he's driven to delirium. Like so many perfectly-executed and enduring Simpsons moments, what we're inevitably left with is a case of full-blown cultural hijacking - it's now virtually impossible to lay eyes on Coolidge's works in any other context and not immediately have Homer's hysterical objections bellowing through your skull (much as it's now impossible not to think of Marge's reaction upon seeing another infamous and much-replicated specimen of animal-orientated visual art). In the case of Homer and those poker-playing dogs, there was always one question lurking at the back of my mind that, for a long time, I was never quite able to satisfy - what, precisely, is the joke here? Other than the really obvious gag (one that I'm confident Coolidge was 100% in on) that the entire premise of dogs playing poker is kind of inherently absurd? No question that they are silly paintings, and at least part of the sequence's appeal lies in the incongruity in seeing such silly images evoking such strong reactions - not only does Homer completely lose his marbles over the thing, but Bart, spoofing Rod Serling in Night Gallery, informs us that the original story that would have tied directly into the Coolidge painting had to be scrapped because it was too horrific. And yet the intensity of Homer's shrieking has me oddly convinced that there is an intrinsic evil to be unpicked from the images - so much so that when the same image (a replication of Coolidge's most famous dog painting, A Friend In Need) later resurfaced in "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", it lends a sinister undercurrent to what would otherwise be a fairly twee sequence of Disneyesque pet courtship. Coolidge's pictures depict a wholly innocuous anthropomorphism - the dogs are behaving like humans, one assumes, for no deeper reason than it making for a cute and amusing visual (compare it to Sir Edwin Landseer's 1840 painting Laying Down The Law, commonly cited as a conceptual forbearer to Coolidge's pictures, which also has naturalistic-looking dogs participating in distinctly human activities, but with a more obviously satirical bent). Homer's visceral reaction to the painting seems to stem from the idea that this kind of lightweight anthropomorphism is, in fact, highly disturbing, as it represents a grotesque subversion on the natural order of things - a point that is later echoed (albeit possibly unintentionally on The Simpsons' part) at the very end of the episode, when Santa's Little Helper engages in what is supposed to be a Snoopy-style jig, but it looks more as though he warrants an urgent visit from Dr Karras.

Still, the effectiveness of the gag is rooted in something quite a bit juicier than Homer detecting evil in an ostensibly dubious source. The Simpsons' was, after all, far from the only cultural voice to send up the works of Coolidge with a fervour that walks a fine line between derision and fascination. The paintings were previously a source of contention between Sam Malone and Diane Chambers in the sitcom Cheers, with the former guilelessly professing to notice something new every time he looked at them. In Larry Shue's 1984 play The Foreigner, a character objects to being put up in a motel room where Coolidge's pictures adorn the walls. In 2002, the Chrysler Museum of Art's idea of an April Fool's prank was to issue a press release claiming that they intended to acquire and exhibit all of the original paintings in their galleries - the mere suggestion that images of dogs playing poker belonged in an institution dedicated to serious art was intended to put you in bawling hysterics not altogether dissimilar to those modelled by Homer. Clearly, there is something about the seemingly harmless gambling mutts that touches a nerve in a lot of people. Coolidge's paintings are an iconic part of Americana, yet America as a whole has a curious love/hate relationship with the images; this much appears to rest on an intuitive consensus that the pictures, while immediately recognisable and highly ubiquitous, are - in total honesty - not actually all that good. They're cute, certainly, but they exude a seedy vulgarity that lets you know, wherever you see one, that you're not in the classiest neck of the woods. Perhaps it's this combination of conceptual fluffiness and visual vulgarity that makes them so successful, and that has enabled Coolidge's dogs to worm their way into so many houses and derelict hotels - there is something undeniably compelling in their unabashed kitschiness. They are, in the words of Jackson Arn of Artsy, "the very definition of a guilty pleasure, the artistic equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." I suspect that this is the real reason why Homer is so terrified by the sight of them - they represent a kind of cultural nightmare, a gleeful celebration of bad taste as it is ceaselessly reproduced and permitted to permeate walls far and wide.

Here's a fun fact about Coolidge's dogs - not only are they horrifying animals, they are Horrifying Advertising Animals, and might even be seen as precursors to the 37 specimens I have covered prior in this series. See, Coolidge didn't create so many images of poker-playing dogs because he found the idea amusing - he had a ulterior motive, in hoping that these wily mutts would charm you into changing your shopping and consumption habits. Coolidge created his original dogs-playing-poker painting, Poker Game, as a stand alone piece in 1984, and might never have revisited the concept had he not later been approached by publishing company Brown & Bigelow in 1903, and commissioned to create sixteen further images as promotional tools for cigars. Not all of the subsequent sixteen show dogs playing poker (some show the dogs at baseball games, ballroom dancing and grappling with a broken-down auto-mobile) but it's the card-handling curs that became the most deeply ingrained in public consciousness. Perhaps it's because these images are the most prominently narrative-driven of the bunch - we get a glimpse into the tensions of the game, and of the underhanded tactics being deployed by the dogs in their tabletop war.

The images have become so iconic in their own right that it was somewhat inevitable that a modern advertising campaign would eventually capitalise on that cultural recognition and appropriate them to their own ends. In the late 1990s, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network ran a series of promos for their Monday Night Football slot that brought Coolidge's dogs to life, using a combination of real dogs and the wonders of cutting-edge technology. CGI was used to animate the characters' mouths - in case you ever wondered what those dogs actually spoke about in between their poker pursuits (as it turns out, nothing of substance). The premise here was that the dogs got together for their Monday night poker sessions and had televised sports blaring in the backdrop, momentarily commanding their attentions from the cards on the table.

The ESPN promos were directed by Joe Pytka, and were recreated from two particular Coolidge paintings, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo, in which the poker participants are a St Bernard, bulldog, boxer, collie and Great Dane. As with the original images, the main tension at the table appears to be between the St Bernard and the bulldog (who has an instantly familiar voice - has it cropped up previously in our tour of advertising critters, per chance?). The one prominent detail in Coolidge's art that has been omitted from the ESPN promos is that the dogs have all kicked their unhealthy smoking habits. Unsurprisingly so - the dogs might have been designed with the very intention of instilling such habits, but sensibilities had moved on, and contemporary viewers were less likely to be charmed by the sight of a cute dog puffing on a stick of nicotine. The promos got around the big issue these dogs would have come up against, even if they could comprehend the rules of the game - that is, they would never be able to survey their hands with their opposable thumb-less paws - by creating a pair of animatronic paws for each dog. The paws look kind of stiff and jerky, and it's an amusing stretch to entertain them actually being attached to the dogs in question, but any commercial using Coolridge's art as its basis is obviously going to benefit from a little low-rent grotesqueness.

Indeed. It is perhaps also entirely befitting for a campaign lifted from such a notoriously unrepentant slice of low art that the promos have a distinctly ersatz flavour to them. Don't get me wrong, Pytka and his team did a splendid job in recreating the Coolridge originals so lovingly in a three-dimensional world; it is, nevertheless, difficult to watch the ads without being put in mind of the Swamp Gang campaign that was making such waves for Budweiser at the time, and which was built upon much the same formula - wacky talking animals giving their sardonic commentary while the product in question is hawked in the backdrop. The ESPN promos were fun and likeable, but with a whisker less wit and invention than their reptilian/amphibian counterparts down at the bayou. Then again, it's not as though these poker-loving mutts had very much to prove. Their status as a cultural juggernaut was already long cemented; so long as they captured enough of the source's weirdly delectable kitsch, it would be enough to set tails wagging (or curling between your legs, depending on your impressions of said source). Only time will if, come the dawn of the 22nd Century, artefacts from the Swamp Gang are inspiring such farcically mixed emotions in the hearts of onlookers.