Neil Hamburger's "AXE body spray and sexual offenders" art contest didn't go over so well with AXE

By Sean O'Neal | June 3, 2011 | 8:21pm

Aux Features Comedy

As any of Neil Hamburger’s Twitter followers know, the anti-comic’s comic has spent many a moon taunting the makers of AXE body spray, the nation’s leading purveyor of citrus musk for bros. Recently, Hamburger used his Vice Magazine column to expound on his distaste for the “preferred deodorant for date-rapists,” in which he characterized it as both “a fetid, sugared-and-fermented-manure stench, which acts as a virtual mating call to the TV-addled, party-fried pig girls whom these dopes are trying to fill with their tainted seed,” as well as the result of “dumping varying amounts of Hawaiian Punch and/or Country Time Lemonade into the trough-style urinals at Dodger Stadium during the top of the 9th inning.” But more than just its olfactory offenses and the fact that the sense memory from its scent causes vague feelings of regret in most ladies, Hamburger also takes issue with AXE’s branding strategies, in which it sponsors everything from music festivals to viral comedy videos in order to seem cool, much as its users tend to drench themselves in its body spray in order to seem hygienic.

Unfortunately for Hamburger, one of those brands it’s latched onto like some kind of cachet vampire is Vice itself, and presumably because AXE is a major sponsor of the magazine, Vice erased both the article and any mention of its existence from its website. (All of this in deference to a brand that prides itself on being a major sponsor of irreverence, so long as it’s never, ever directed at AXE.) But Hamburger isn’t one to be cowed by censorship: He’s still looking for entries for the contest he launched at the end of the column (archived here) “in keeping with the spirit of good-natured fun and light-hearted ribbing that has characterized my relationship with our friends at AXE”—one that asks you to create artwork incorporating AXE products with photos from the National Sex Offender Registry. You can tweet your submissions at Hamburger here, where he will no doubt continue to bait AXE, despite their best efforts to clean his insults from the Internet. Maybe they should just spray a shitload of AXE on it? [via Splitsider]