The Coffee Table Book A Camel Named Joe Chronicles Joe Camel's Ultra-Smooth, Disconcertingly Successful Campaign to Sell Cigarettes to Children

This camel fucks!

If I could ask the advertising wizards behind Joe Camel one question, it would be, “How can you live with yourselves, you bloodsucking monsters?” 

I’d have other questions as well, of course, but they’d probably be so put off by the Old Testament wrath and indignation of my opening query that they’d refuse to answer any follow-ups. 

If the people who dreamed up Joe Camel did their job correctly impressionable children would buy cigarettes and eventually die of lung cancer.  Let’s just say that Joe Camel did very well. Boy oh boy were they successful in selling cigarettes to children! It’s one of the best known, most notorious ad campaigns in American history. So a LOT of people will undoubtedly die agonizing, prolonged deaths from lung cancer directly because of it. 

Joe Camel was all about being smooth, smoking, selling cigarettes to children and giving people lung cancer. He was a jet-setting, glamorous pitch-camel who fucked as well as a lightning rod for criticism just because his entire persona seem laser-focused on selling carcinogens to small children. 

You have to have a pretty funky sense of morality to get into the cigarette business in the first place, on account of it killing so many people, but selling cigarettes to children through a cool cartoon spokesman with a distractingly phallic face lands you in a whole new circle of hell, deeper and darker and more terrible than all the others. 

The folks behind Joe Camel were so proud of the fine work they did selling cigarettes to children that after the campaign ended due to public outrage and lawsuits they did a victory lap in the form of the coffee table book A Camel Named Joe: The Illustrated Story of an American Icon. 

In my capacity as a professional reader of cursed texts I ordered the book off Ebay so that I could immerse myself in Joe’s smoothly sociopathic world. 

I honestly think Dole might have won had he chosen a less problematic running mate.

I am fascinated by Joe Camel as one of the most notorious figures in the history of American advertising but also as a figure of pure kitsch, an icon of All-American late 1980s/1990s banality who absolutely killed in more ways than one. 

The forward to A Camel Named Joe by John Mezzina, who readers will instantly recognize as the Chairman and Executive Creative Director of advertising agency Mezzina/Brown Inc. understandably downplays the whole “selling cigarettes to children” and “being too unethical even for a business rooted in giving people fatal diseases” aspects of Joe Camel in favor of playing up his status as a triumph of branding. 

As the ad world bigwig writes disingenuously, “This isn’t a book about politics. This is, quite simply, a book about Joe, a charismatic camel who became nothing less than an American pop phenomenon.” 

This is followed by an introduction that references Camel’s customers and Joe Camel’s target audience as “adult smokers” so often that it quickly becomes a writerly tic. Then again, it’s also possible that the author uses the phrase “adult smokers” so compulsively is because he needs to differentiate adult smokers from Joe Camel’s target audience of kiddie Camel fiends.

Like Wu-Tang Clan, Joe Camel was for the children but A Camel Named Joe will have you know in no uncertain terms that he was, in fact, strictly for adult smokers the same way that head shops will similarly insist that its pipes and bongs are only for smoking harmless legal tobacco and with about as much conviction. 

Joe was introduced to American girls and boys as a visual pun, a smoking camel smoking Camels, for the groundbreaking death merchant’s 75th birthday. 

“75 Years and Still Smokin’” bragged the campaign’s tag-line. That’s surprising because lung cancer kills most heavy smokers well before they reach their seventies, particularly if they start smoking while still in kindergarten, the clear aim of the ghouls who brought Joe Camel to life. 

From the very beginning, Joe Camel was an aspirational figure, an anthropomorphic camel men wanted to be and women wanted to fuck. He was a rugged exemplar of old school masculinity equally at home in a tuxedo, fishing gear or opening a bottle of champagne after triumphing at the race track. 

Human women are forever staring lustily at cocky, confident, swaggering Joe in a series of colorful tableaus that give the campaign a hint of playful bestiality to go along with all of its other moral crimes. 

Because Joe Camel was pitched exclusively to the 10 and under set it of course couldn’t show Joe’s enormous genitalia but every image is designed to really drive home the idea that Joe is literally hung like a camel, which is the source of all of his confidence. 

Joe Camel’s ads occasionally took gentle aim at rival Marlboro through the repeated image of a hapless cowboy being denied entry to a swinging camel soiree. I’m glad they stopped before the jabs escalated into a tragicomic image of a cuckolded Marlboro man weeping and masturbating as he watches Joe Camel make sweet love to Mrs. Marlboro Man with a tenderness and skill her husband could never hope to match.

T.J!

In a 1991 ad entitled “Hot Tub”, a smoking, beer-guzzling Joe looks up at the reader from inside a hot tub with a flirtatious expression that says both, “Come on in. The water is fine” and “This dick isn’t going to suck itself.” 

As a disturbingly seductive combination of animal and man, Joe Camel's existence presents any number of questions. Does he have a tail? What about humps? Does he have feet? Should they be shown? What does his cock look like? Is he circumcised or uncircumcised? Is there a Mrs. Joe Camel? 

The people behind Joe Camel contemplated giving Joe Camel a girlfriend in the form of fellow humanoid camel with attitude T.J before ultimately deciding that someone like Joe could never settle down with just one woman, particularly one whose face was unintentionally simian and canine.

So T.J. was unceremoniously canned, a victim of poor character design and a target audience of small boys liable to think that girls are gross and kissing is yucky. 

Totally not a gay bar!

When Joe opened a packed, sprawling nightclub called Joe’s Club female camels entered the equation for the very first time so that it did not look like Joe and all of his male friends were partying, drinking and smoking Camels in a massive gay bar. 

Needless to say, seeing penis-faced humanoid camels in same-sex relationships hanging out and having fun would send the wrong message to the small children Camel was trying to get addicted to nicotine, or at least that’s how people seemed to think in the early 1990s. 

Joe had unmistakable star quality. That’s a big part of the reason he was so successful selling death to schoolchildren. But over the years he picked up a sizable supporting cast made up primarily of The Hard Pack, a blues band in the Blues Brothers mold that actually put out a cassette of cigarette-themed blues called Meet the Hard Pack in 1993 featuring tracks like “Empty Lighter Blues” that I will DEFINITELY find an excuse to write about.

Joe and his squad did more than become unlikely recording artists. Joe ran for president in 1992, picking up 37 electoral votes and spoiling George H.W Bush’s chance of getting re-elected and was the inspiration for a mini-magazine called Smooth. 

As depicted in illustrations that re-defined “smooth”, Joe was at once an idealized everyman and the coolest guy at the bar, the ultimate alpha-camel. 

Joe Camel was lifestyle porn that gave small children a seductive glimpse into adult life as one long party that never had to end. It’s airbrushed Americana at its most beguilingly tacky. 

A Camel Named Joe never addresses the elephant in the room, that its subject became famous and iconic because he’s colorful, memorable and elegantly realized by talented illustrators but also because people were understandably disgusted that Camel was so nakedly pitching its products to children. 

Joe is famous as well as infamous. He’s notorious. He’s got blood on his hands and cancer in his lungs. Yet Joe Camel is also tremendously appealing from an aesthetic standpoint. 

Morally, Joe Camel represented an embarrassing ad world nadir on par with Spuds Mackenzie, another kiddie favorite pitchman for a product no child should be interested in. From a creative and commercial standpoint, however, he was a massive success, a character so bold and irresistible that the public fell in love with him despite Joe Camel being a Pied Piper gaily leading children along a path that ends with them dying from lung cancer. 

How effective is Joe Camel? Let’s just say that as I write this I am stealing drags from a Camel Ultra Light. That’s right: I decided to take up smoking because of A Camel Named Joe. Oh sure. I’ve heard there are downsides to the habit like cancer and death and spending a lot of money on something that is literally killing you but my friend Joe makes it all seem so fucking cool and so fucking smooth (we’re talking Carlos Santana/Rob Thomas levels of smoothness) that I would be a fool not to head down to the local corner store to pick up some “smokes.”

Better late than never, right? 

Somewhere up in Advertising Heaven, or possibly Hell, Joe Camel is looking on with pride and maybe blowing a little righteous smoke in my direction in appreciation. 

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