Last All-Star weekend, Los Angeles Clippers power forward Blake Griffin won the hearts and minds of prospective automobile consumers all over the world when he dunked over a Kia Optima in the Sprite Slam Dunk event. It's since become Griffin's signature achievement, good enough to stick in a high-gloss car advertisement and various other forms of NBA-related promotion.
To celebrate the anniversary of the dunk, Kia and FunnyorDie.com partnered to produce two videos featuring Griffin and his good friend the Optima. In the first, available for your viewing pleasure above, Griffin and a dunkologist (played by Jeff Goldblum) attempt to execute a daring plan in which the Optima dunks over Griffin, presumably because everyone involved really loves Yakov Smirnoff.
It doesn't go particularly well. So, in the second video, a despondent Griffin sits down with Kensington Rutherford III (played by Wyatt Cenac) to discuss what went wrong. Check that clip out after the jump.
There are two types of comedy at work here. The first video relies on a very simple idea: complicated buildup with lots of moving parts leads to simple failure. The second is more clearly in Griffin's Will Ferrell-influenced wheelhouse: extreme emotions muttered with a straight face. Plus, BG comes up with maybe the best-ever description of entering the NBA draft early: "I dropped out of school to play basketball."
So, yes, there are some good jokes. On the other hand, these are pretty obviously ads for Kia ? Cenac even notes the Optima's horsepower in one of his questions. It's up to you to decide if that ruins the fun of the whole thing.
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