When Chris Farley died in 1997, his friend and co-star David Spade didn’t attend the funeral. Why? As he put it at the time, he “could not be in a room where Chris was in a box.” Which seemed like a weird, somewhat heartless thing to say about a friend who had just died, but everybody mourns differently.

Still, though. Now we’ve got this:

Hey, at least he’s not in a box, right?

There seem to be two schools of thought about this ad. One is that Spade is selling out his dead friend’s memory and it’s sorta creepy. The other is that Spade is selling out his dead friend’s memory and it’s incredibly freaking creepy.

Asylum.com was able to get a statement from Spade about the controversy:

“When DIRECT TV came to me and the Farley family with this idea about ‘Tommy Boy,’ we talked and thought it would be a cool way to remind people just how funny Chris was. It is a clever homage to my friend and a movie that we loved doing.”

Is it really? It’s a clip from Tommy Boy intercut with present-day Spade in a hairpiece shilling for satellite TV. What’s clever about that?

Maybe it wouldn’t turn my stomach if I didn’t know the two of them were friends, and that Spade was so distraught over Farley’s death that he couldn’t go to the funeral. This just seems like some sort of weird denial or something. Just another way of not dealing with it. Except this time he got paid, so that’s pretty sweet.

If you want to remember Chris Farley, his movies aren’t too hard to find. And when you watch them on DVD, the only thing he’s selling are the pratfalls.

Update: They were talking about this at AdFreak.com the other day, and a commenter named Jocelyn put her finger on it:

This one really bothers me, and I realized why this afternoon when I saw it yet again. Spade’s talking about how if you had DirecTV, he wouldn’t have to be putting up with Farley/Tommy/whatever you’d like to call the ‘character’ in the commercial. I can’t imagine that Spade would be comfortable implying that he wouldn’t give anything for the chance to hang out with his friend again.

Yep. Sure, Spade is supposed to be in character as he’s saying that, but it’s tough to get past the fact that it’s a guy talking about his dead friend. Just… oof.

Update: According to Walletpop.com, in 2006 Chris Farley’s family first approved the use of his image in advertising for Prometa, a medication used for drug and alcohol addiction. Which seems like a pretty honorable thing. It was to help other people avoid his fate, right? But check out what Farley’s brother Tom told Matt Lauer about the complaints that they were exploiting the dead:

LAUER: I guess you’ve heard some people are saying, well first of all, how do you know that this par–why–why endorse this particular drug or alcohol program? How do you know it might have helped or not helped Chris?

Mr. FARLEY: Well, we–we have no idea whether it would have helped or not helped Chris, but he–Chris was certainly open to any of the, you know, treatments. He went–he was in everything from, you know, the boot camps to the spas to everything else. So he would have probably embraced anything that would have helped him with this addiction. But you know, this is–this is something that takes into effect a lot of different aspects of the addiction, and I just think, you know, it’s a–it’s a good–good start to–to helping people, whether it, you know, works or not, that’s–you know, we’ll see. But so far it looks like the tests for Prometa look–look very promising.

LAUER: If the goal’s to help people, I guess the other question being raised is why take the $25,000?

Mr. FARLEY: Well, you know that–that’s just kind of the price for–I mean everyone, you know, knows that this is–it’s an ad campaign, and we’ve–we’ve turned down so many offers for you know, Bobbleheads and Ringtones for–for three, four, five times that. I mean it’s really not about that.

Fair enough. What’s this about, then?

You might be saying, “Farley’s family is fine with it, so who are you to judge?” Well, I’m a prospective customer of the product being sold. That’s the playing field they’ve chosen.