So God Made A Farmer

Submission 29,874

Part of a series on Super Bowl XLVII. [View Related Entries]

About

"So God Made A Farmer" is the title of a speech given by the late American radio personality Paul Harvey at the Future Farmers of America convention in 1978. Following the airing of a Dodge Ram commercial set to the audio recording of the speech during Super Bowl XLVII in February 2013, parodies of the commercial and the speech based on other occupations, races or subcultures began appearing on YouTube.

Origin

The Dodge Ram commercial was created in collaboration with the National FFA Organization honoring American farmers by utilizing voice clips from former radio personality Paul Harvey’s So God Made a Farmer speech^[1] at a convention event in 1978. Inspired by a 2011 Farms.com video (shown below, left), Dodge Ram used a recording a Harvey's speech in a two-minute Super Bowl XLVII ad (shown below, left), which aired on February 3rd, 2013. The ad was promptly uploaded to Ram's YouTube channel, as Dodge agreed to donate up to 1 million dollars to the foundation based on its YouTube views.^[3] In less than five days, the video amassed over 10 million views and shared, allowing Dodge to donate the full 1 million dollars.^[4]

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Precursor

Prior to the Super Bowl commercial, a handful of spoofs of Paul Harvey's speech appeared on the web including May 2011's text tribute "So God Made a Wrestler"^[5] and January 2013's video "So God Made a Fireman" (shown below).

Spread

The day after the Super Bowl commercial aired, the first derivative videos began to appear on YouTube. One of the first, titled "So God Made a (Latino) Farmer" (shown below, left), which used the Harvey voiceover word for word, but used images of Hispanic and Latino farmers instead. The same day, a parody video titled "So God Made A Migrant" (shown below, right) was uploaded, with a voiceover reflecting the troubles migrant workers in the United States may encounter due to stereotypes.

Funny or Die posted a parody video titled "God Made a Factory Farmer" (shown below) on February 7th, 2013, criticizing some of the negative aspects of the agricultural industry and the motivations behind a car company using farmer imagery to sell their vehicles. Over the course of the week following the Super Bowl, video parodies were featured on Fark^[8], Raw Story^[9], The Celebrity Cafe^[10], Grist^[11], Petapixel^[12], FastCoExist^[13] and FOX Nation.^[14]

Notable Examples

As of February 11th, 2013, There are about 250 search results on YouTube for "so god made a"^[6] and approximately 120 search results for "Paul Harvey parody."

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