Math is hard! Let's bake some cookies for the boys!

You might remember this gag from when Breyer's did it first, years ago, using cute preschoolers and ice cream in place of grown women and canned soup. Sadly, that ad could not be located online, but the premise was that a preponderance of ingredients that the children could not pronounce, like "polysorbate 80," meant frankenfoods, while Breyer's, which contained only "milk, cream, sugar and natural flavors," was clearly wholesome and nonthreatening. Adorable. Effective.

Now here's this:

Announcer: What might you find in Progresso Light?

Woman #1: [surprised] Artificial flavor!

Woman #2: Wonolatteeee, uh...

Woman #1: Monosodium glu- gluta- mate?

It's cute when small children stumble over big words. It's ridiculous when adult women are hired to act like wide-eyed dumbasses, and you know they're struggling to act when the blonde says "monosodium" perfectly and then has to remind herself to stutter through "glutamate."

Woman #3: That's MSG.

Announcer: All light soups are not created equal. Select Harvest Light has good stuff.

Thank goodness for abbreviations and shorthand like "good stuff." All those other details and syllables make tiny female brains hurt.

Woman #4: Pasta with whole grain!

Woman #5: Natural sea salt.

Woman #6: There's roasted natural chicken in here!

Through the miracle of modern science.

Announcer: Progresso weighs their light soup down with MSG and sodium.

Woman #1: Sodium, sodium, sodium.

She's certainly got "sodium" down. I can tell she practiced for hours. Probably with a coach.

Woman #6: This is heart healthy.

Woman #5: 80 calories.

Announcer: New Select Harvest Light, from Campbell's. Real ingredients, real taste.

Woman #6: [smiles cutely and holds up her bowl] More please!

As we've established earlier, you are a grown woman. Go get your own damn soup.

And thus ends the unintentional theme for today, which is that women, like children, become overwhelmed by all your polysyllabic words and science-y chemical mumbo-jumbo. It's unintentional because presumably, every actor in this commercial was cast to act confused and naive, and presumably the reason that all the actors were women was that women are the key demographic for light soups. This commercial would have been off-kilter even with a mix of male and female adult actors, but manages to strike a worse note because only females appear.

I don't buy your script, because it's obvious that all of these people are playing dumb. And I won't buy your soup, because your commercial is a damn mess.