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Screengrab via Ted Cruz/Youtube

Ted Cruz’s parody Christmas video is actually kind of funny

Ted Cruz is harnessing the power of self-mockery, and it works.

 

Mary Emily O'Hara

Tech

Posted on Dec 19, 2015   Updated on May 27, 2021, 11:37 am CDT

Watch out, Trump: Ted Cruz is climbing up your tailpipe.

The conservative GOP candidate from Texas has been lagging in the polls throughout the fall, unable to catch up to fellow Republicans Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and the ever-dominating Donald Trump as the 2016 election heats up.

But this week, Cruz has climbed to the No. 2 spot in the majority of polls, and his newest campaign video is sure to boost those numbers even further by banking on the time-honored tradition of making people laugh at a candidate during Saturday Night Live.

Cruz isn’t actually hosting SNL (that’s unlikely to happen, after he insinuated that producer Lorne Michaels could be jailed for making fun of politicians) tonight, but his campaign bought a prime commercial slot for his latest video to run during the show.

The ad, called “Cruz Christmas Classics,” features Cruz sitting on the couch with his wife and two young children reading parody Christmas stories like The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails and Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer. It’s actually pretty funny.

“I will audit him here or there, I will audit him anywhere,” goes a passage from the imagined Lois Lerner classic Auditing St. Nick.

Toward the end of the parody, a number of fun titles like Death to Christmas: The Ayatollah’s Big Red Bomb scroll down the screen as a narrator says: “If you are not completely satisfied with this collection of Cruz Christmas Classics, you probably hate Christmas. And America.”

It’s no secret that a little comedy can inject life into a jammed campaign. An appearance on SNL is now considered a must for a leading candidate: Barack Obama appeared on the show in 2007 just before winning the presidency, Hillary Clinton mocked herself on Kate McKinnon’s famous “bar talk” skit this October, and Donald Trump somehow managed to snag a gig hosting an entire episode in November.

And comedy isn’t the only thing breathing life into Cruz’s previously dying campaign. This month, shoppers on Amazon are picking up copies of a new paperback Cruz Christmas Classic called A Cruzmas Carol: Ted Cruz Takes a Dickens of a Constitutional. That’s right, it’s erotica. With glory holes.

Nation, everyone can learn something from ol’ Felito (that’s the nickname Cruz was called for most of his young life). If you want to capture the hearts of American voters, you have to first make them laugh. And make them horny.

H/T The Hill | Screengrab via Ted Cruz/YouTube

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*First Published: Dec 19, 2015, 3:53 pm CST