Watching this short again I found myself thinking the Jesters were actually pretty nifty.
You just don't see stuff like this in advertising anymore. For one thing, they actually weren't half bad as singers. Bad harmonizing grates on my ears like a pavement saw hitting a sewage pipe, but these guys were good. (Nitpick: They should have tried a little harder to sound like different people when singing as "the boys from the Golden West", p'rhaps...and Mrs. Newlywed was everything the Jesters weren't: she was just freaking awful, almost enough of a vocal annoyance to offset their talent...but hey, it was just a bloody advert for pork. Can't have everything be perfect.)
I am not sure what sort of audience would have been viewing this - it seems long for a TV commercial, and though I cannot find a date on it, I think around that time television would have all been live (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here) so my conclusion is that it must have shown at movie theatres during intermissions and between feature films.
I think advertising of this sort is charmingly honest and simple - and it's a shame that nowadays adverts are all about psychology and demographics and market research. Here, we had a mildly entertaining skit that actually taught me something about how to cook!* My favourite riff, therefore, was "If I were a Jester, I'd want to be the one who made the salad. He's the 'thinking man's Jester'..."
When's the last time you learned something from a modern advert? Or "post-modern" advert? (I have no clue what the difference between "modern" and "post-modern" is, even after reading a whole lot of crap about this very subject in college.)
I tried Googling these guys and came up with a doo-wop group having that name from around that time...but they all turned out to be black. Guess those were different Jesters. Anyone else know anything else about whether or not these guys did anything else with their barbershop trio besides this one pork advert?
*Too bad pork has such uhm...unpleasant gastrointestinal effects on me - ones that also are unpleasant to anyone around me with a nose - for an hour or two after eating it. Maybe one day I will just say the hell with it and try that recipe anyway - it does look tasty...