This is the best 2024 Super Bowl ad yet—with 9 days to go

Given his pedigree playing such characters as Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier, when Patrick Stewart issues an instruction, one’s automatic instinct is to follow it.

However, in the new Super Bowl ad from Paramount+, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa hesitates when that instruction is three simple words: Throw the child.

Created by ad agency Droga5 and directed by David Shane, “Sir Patrick Stewart Throws A Hail Arnold” manages to take so many of the elements that so many Super Bowl ads have—a collection of celebrities, a comedic concept—and combine them in a way that makes it feel fresh and actually funny.

Why are Stewart, Tagovailoa, Jeff Probst, Drew Barrymore, Knuckles, Arnold, Peppa, and Creed stuck on Paramount Mountain in the first place? Who cares! It’s all just weird enough to make the suspension of disbelief possible.

Credit to Droga5 for leaning into dark, odd humor for the Super Bowl, and to the brand for going with it. But the key here may be director David Shane, who has long been a master of commercial and short-form comedy.

Way back in 2014, Shane gave me a peek into his process, in how to craft a funny ad, and you can see it alive in this latest spot.

For Shane, it’s all about a great script, and then looking for specific moments. “All stories, whether 24 seconds or 2 hours, are really a collection of moments,” Shane said. “Nobody tells their friends the plot of a movie over and over, but they do quote lines and specific scenes all the time. So, the first thing I’m doing is looking for that or the possibility of that in a script. Moments are about real human behavior. People laugh because they recognize themselves in what they’re watching.”

He said that another important quality to any funny ad is comedic friction. “Someone said this, it may have been Freud, but I don’t know because I never graduated college: ‘Violence is funny whether it is emotional or physical,’” said Shane. “In a script, that means finding where the friction is coming from, then it’s about finding the places where people are trying to not reveal what they’re thinking. We never think we’re an open book, but our expressions can betray that. What’s the subtext? Especially in commercials, I’m always trying to work the subtext. What are they saying . . . but what are they really saying? Also, awkwardness is funny.”

Peppa Pig knows exactly what he’s talking about.