Toby Jones and his Businesses

From my last post, you might think that any piece of comedy that I thought was real at some point, then discovered was actually fake, would cease to make me laugh. But this is not actually the case for everything. In fact, one video in particular continues to make me laugh in spite of discovering I was wrong about its origins.

“Jones Big A** Truck Rental and Storage” is a set of commercials for a storage company supposedly in the back yard of a warehouse owned by “Tobias Jones” in Chicago, IL. The commercials appear to be made by Toby himself, with perhaps a film crew of a couple friends. I would post them here, but as this is for a public audience and they contain some adult language (as you may be able to tell from his business’ name) and I don’t want to offend anyone. If you don’t mind, you can look it up yourself.

Anyhow, the commercials describe Jones’ cavalier attitude toward the storage that goes on in his warehouse, explaining how if it is in his yard, he doesn’t care. He goes on to list many different items that could possibly be stored in his yard, including a “suitcase full of money” or “your mother-in-law.” There is also a link on the website to his next business, “Jones Good A** Bar-B-Que and Foot Massage,” a combination restaurant and massage parlor that will even “massage your feet in any of these fine sauces.” The corny jingle and dance in the beginning screamed amateur and I was convinced that both of Jones’ ventures were real businesses.

Others were less sure. In fact, one of my friends insisted that it couldn’t be real, and I insisted just as adamantly that it sure could.

Long story short, I was wrong. As it says in this article for NBC Chicago by Emily Lobdell, "Toby Jones" is actually a Chicago comedian named Robert Hines. The businesses were fake, and so was Jones. So that’s when it stopped being funny, right?

Nope! It’s still funny today, and I still show the commercials off to my friends whenever I can. In fact, there’s even a new business for the Jones brand – “Cheap A** Pre-paid Legal and Daycare Center.” But why didn’t Hines go the way of Andy Milonakis for me? I wouldn’t be so quick to say that it is a particularly higher level of humor (although the editing in the commercials is fantastic). I guess the root of it is that the humor itself was not related to the deceit. For Milonakis, the whole point of his act was that you were supposed to believe that he was a child coming up with all of the shticks. But “Toby Jones” was just a character – the humor was in the way he spoke and the way his businesses were really so ridiculous. I probably should have caught on that they were fake, but perhaps I really wanted them to be real.

In short, something I believed that turned out to be fake will not always stop being funny. Instead, it seems that if the humor of the particular situation is unrelated to its false premise, it can still be just as funny.