Screenshot: Schticky website When you're an insomniac freelance writer who works from home, you end up seeing a lot of infomercials, and eventually, those things will wear you down. No matter how skeptical you might start off, you will eventually get to a point where you'll start to wonder if there actually is somebody out there with a better way to fry eggs, chop tomatoes and make milkshakes in the comfort of your own home. I mean, television's never lied to us before, has it? That's why I wanted to actually check out a few of these things to see if they really were the life-changing innovations they purported to be. Today's experiment: The Schticky.
The Pitch
I'll be honest with you, folks: My interest in the Schticky is based almost entirely around the commercial. I don't think it would be humanly possible for me to care less about a reusable lint roller by itself, but I am obsessed with it as the third and final act of what I like to call the Vince Trilogy.
Taken together, Offer's three ads are one of the most complex and compelling narratives of the 21st century. I'm sure you remember his debut with the ShamWow. It's a portrait of the confidence and energy of youth (and maybe cocaine), with Vince spitting rapid-fire patter into a headset mic, praising German engineering and challenging the cameraman to keep up with his demonstration. He even went so far as to drop the now-infamous "we can't do this all day" qualifier to the standard but-wait-there's-more offer, making it seem like you were being an inconvenience to him by buying the product he is trying to sell you. It's pure pitchman brilliance.
In the second act, the ad for the Slap Chop, we see Vince at the top of his game. He's throwing out more jokes, and just as importantly, more insults to the audience. He tells the viewer that they're leading boring lives because their tuna isn't chopped properly and implying that we're fat because we're too lazy to chop carrots if it takes more effort than moving one finger. The dude is basically running a pickup artist game and negging his entire audience, but in a way that's kind of chummy about it.
This time, when he announces that he can't give you the Graty unless you call right now, there's a knowing nod to it, and his near-sigh at the hardships of life (in this case, cutting an onion) makes it seem like he's in it with us. He doesn't act like he's trying to sell us something, he's trying to get us to buy something he thinks we'll like. He doesn't have the hunger of the guy trying to sell you the ShamWow, because he's already done it. He's comfortable in his success; the Slap Chop is his victory lap.
This one, though, the Schticky … this thing is the Dark Knight Rises of infomercials. There's a four-year gap between the Slap Chop and the Schticky, and when Vince returns, it's as an older, perhaps wiser man, certainly wearier, and completely devoid of giving a damn. This ad is two minutes long, and the Schticky itself has, at most, about ten seconds of information that you need to get across: It's a reusable lint roller. You can wash it with water. There is a smaller one and there is also a bigger one. It costs 20 bucks. That's it. So once that's done, Vince takes the remaining time and makes the ad about himself.
It's a move that he'd been building to for five years, from the moment he stepped onto television as a guy willing to sell you a dubious product that actually has the word "Sham" right in the name. Here, he pulls the same trick by turning a simple ad into a comedy routine, full of dick jokes, callbacks to his previous catchphrases, and a reference to that time he was arrested for getting into a fistfight with a prostitute. He makes it a schtick.
And then he says that people spend a hundred bucks a year on disposable lint rollers. That seems a little dubious, but keep in mind that I'm someone who writes about the narrative arcs in infomercials for a living. I don't exactly have to make sure my suits are pristine, or actually own a suit at all.
The Process
Unlike the previous entries in this column, I didn't actually order this one through their website. Instead, I found it by chance in the "As Seen On TV" section at my local Dollar General and picked it up there. It's a good thing I did, too: To get this thing online, you have to go to schticky.ca, and I'm not even sure Canada has laws against identity theft. There's no way in hell I'm giving my credit card number to some Guy or Michel or, God forbid, aGord.
The downside to picking it up at a store was that my set only came with the Schticky and the Little Schticky, seen here with a copy of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand for scale (please note that Vince Offer is also in scale with Mr. Cent). I didn't get the Big Schticky, which means that if I drop any coins onto the floor, I'll have to pick them up with my hands like some kind of caveman. Then again, the two-piece set only cost me 10 bucks, so I guess that's a fair trade.
What I did get, though, was the Schticky 10-Year Limited Warranty paper, which includes a few front-runners for my new favorite sentence in the English language:
"IF THE SCHTICKY COMES IN CONTACT WITH AMMONIA, BLEACH, ALCOHOL OR ANY OTHER HARSH CLEANING PRODUCT, IT WILL CAUSE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE TO THE SCHTICKY. THIS TYPE OF MISUSE OF THE SCHTICKY IS NOT COVERED UNDER THIS WARRANTY."
I know jokes about band names are as a dead horse, but c'mon: Misuse of the Schticky. It's right there.
The Product
Remember how I said earlier that all of the information about the Schticky itself can be summed up in about 10 seconds? That pretty much holds up to reviews, too: It works pretty well. I used it to get some dust off a messenger bag and some potato chip crumbs off an armchair (don't you judge me), and it performed exactly as advertised.
It did not, however, hold up to my attempt to recreate Vince's no-look shuriken throw, but I didn't really expect it to. The only real problem is that rinsing a bunch of pet hair down your kitchen sink seems like a pretty terrible idea, but that's only if you're too lazy to have a strainer in your drain. Which, if you're the type of person who buys a Slap Chop in order to make salads easier, you probably are.
