YouTube Comment of the Week: Westchester County Fair

For this edition of YTCOTW (that’s what the kids call it, yo), we look at another ad that ran completely unchanged for my entire childhood and adolescence and a small portion of my adulthood, too. It’s a commercial for the Westchester County Fair. If you know anything about Westchester County, NY, you know that large swaths of it are comprised of suburbs that are both insanely affluent and oddly retro, like a safe haven for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit recreationists. If you went to many towns in Westchester and saw Don Draper staggering his way up the sidewalk after a five-martini business lunch, you would not be surprised.

And yet, when the time came for the Westchester County Fair to promote itself, they chose to produce a commercial that looks and sounds like an outtake from Hee-Haw. Fiddles! Tow Mater accents! Hay! This ad appears more suited for Hooterville than one of the richest places in the country.

This is one of the most viewed and most commented upon ads in my YouTube collection. It ran for so long on local TV that it strikes an immediate chord with anyone who grew up within a 100-mile radius of New York in the last 30 years. That’s why I found this comment oddly affecting.