How Do Ben Affleck's Dunkin Super Bowl Commercials Compare To Casey Affleck's SNL Parody?
The Super Bowl is always filled with fun new commercials, and Ben Affleck just gave us a good one. Viewers tonight got to watch the Academy Award-winning actor struggle his way through taking drive-thru orders at a regular Dunkin' Donuts joint. In the clip that aired and all the other ones released on Dunkin's YouTube channel, Affleck doesn't seem to be very quick or accurate with ringing in the customer's orders, but nobody seems to mind once they realize who he is. (Well, one customer doesn't know who Affleck is, and Affleck seems devastated to hear it.)
Things get awkward when Affleck's wife Jennifer Lopez shows up in a minivan, getting on her husband's case for this new gig of his. "Is this what you do when you say you're going to work all day?" she asks in disbelief. She's only in the ad for a few seconds, but there's a ton of fun implications about their marriage thrown in there.
Perhaps most of all, this ad is reminiscent of something another Affleck brother did a few years back. For a parody commercial on "Saturday Night Live," Casey Affleck played a customer from Massachusetts causing trouble at his local Dunkin' Donuts. He gets into fights with the other customers, gets yelled at by the manager for smoking; he's the type of guy often referred to as a Masshole, and anyone from Boston can tell you his depiction's on point.
Casey's commercial is funnier; Ben's is more wholesome
Although it can be hard to fully enjoy Casey Affleck's performances knowing about the sexual harassment allegations aimed at him, the sketch is filled with so many sharply observed jokes that it's impossible not to appreciate it at least a little, especially for viewers who grew up in the area it's parodying. As one of the top comments for the video put it, "I grew up in Massachusetts. This is less of a parody and more of a documentary." The spiritual sequel to this sketch ("Sam Adams," starring another Massachusetts native Bill Burr) released a few years later in 2020, once again portraying New England guys as being honest, loud, and charmingly quick to anger.
Ben Affleck's commercial is less satirical than Casey's, of course — it's an actual commercial, after all — but it also gives us an authentic look at average Dunkin' customers and employees in New England. Ben filmed the commercial at an actual Dunkin Donuts in Medford, Massachusetts, and his interactions with these everyday customers are real, at least as far as we can tell. They may not be throwing their coffees at other customer's cars or getting into fist fights with their buddies, but they're still real New Englanders. It's not as mean-spirited a depiction as Casey's fake commercial, but all five of Ben's ads are still a delight to watch.