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Samsung's Super Bowl Teaser Shows a Welcome Sense of Humor about Apple Lawsuits

This article is more than 10 years old.

There’s nothing funny about being ordered to pay $1.05 billion in damages for copyright infringement. If you do have to make jokes about it, however, it helps to have Seth Rogen, Bob Odenkirk and Paul Rudd hanging around.

Samsung has released a teaser for its Super Bowl commercial that stands as a wonderful little artifact of the intensely litigious world that is smartphone manufacturing in the early 2010’s. In it, the three actors are trying to come up with an idea for their ad, but can’t say any of the words actually associated with it. They end up describing “the big plate,” a game between The San Francisco “50 minus one-es” and the Baltimore “black birds.”

The three never mention Apple, Samsung, rounded corners or anything like that, but it’s fairly clear what they’re talking about here. Samsung and Apple are still locked in a multi-national copyright war, and its easy to interpret Apple as the unnamed sue-happy other in the spot.  It already has

A good ad says something, and this allows Samsung to put a real personality on top of one of the biggest tech companies in the world. In a world of popular opinion where Apple is increasingly seen as the villain when it comes to patent litigation, Samsung has done a nice little job setting itself up as the plucky underdog. Watch below: