The Mr. Peanut ad saga is a strange byproduct of the internet's death obsession

Spend enough time online and you’ll grow comfortable with death. That is not to say you will reach an actual detente with the horrors of mortality, but rather you’ll become used to the subject of death creeping into your internet existence.

Absurdly morbid jokes about dying, depression, and other darks things are the backbone of almost every social media platform — but nowhere is it more true than on Twitter.

Which brings us to Mr. Peanut.

In case you missed this particularly strange saga, Planters — insert your own air quotes — killed off its longtime mascot Mr. Peanut of 104 years. Come Super Bowl Sunday, barring any change in plans, Planters will debut the next major chapter in its Mr. Peanut death saga via an ad during the big game. The whole thing is a bit of a dark, weird twist for a character that's never been particularly beloved online.

The ad campaign focused on death is representative of the lifecycle of anything online. Someone has an interesting idea, it’s picked up by other power users, it hits the general posting public. And then come the brands, which copy the gist of the idea and sanitize it.

But in Planters’ case, it sanitized a version of internet death jokes on a massive scale. It created an unavoidable social push for the stunt and ran an ad that showed the legume plunging to its death (along the way saving actors Wesley Snipes and Matt Walsh).

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But then, four days later, real-life tragedy struck: Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash in California.

In the wake of the horrific accident, Kraft Heinz (Planters’ parent company) paused the campaign and stopped tweeting about the faux-death. The company said it was holding off on further promotions until the Super Bowl on Sunday — where it will, reportedly, run a planned spot showing Mr. Peanut’s funeral.

“We are saddened by this weekend’s news and Planters has paused all campaign activities, including paid media, and will evaluate next steps through a lens of sensitivity to those impacted by this tragedy,” Kraft Heinz said in a statement earlier this week. (The company did not respond to a request for further comment from Mashable.)

But what a strange world it is, where the tragic and highly-publicized deaths of nine people somehow forced a delay in the staged death of cartoon brand-legume. It makes a certain kind of sense: Planters co-opted the absurdity of Twitter’s dark jokes, but reality robbed that plan of its absurdity.

“If one stylistic approach in a meme is to take a thing and subvert it — in this case we’re subverting our expectations around death — holding it accountable to a very concrete death, it becomes a little too real, a little too specific,” said Jed Brubaker, an assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado, who is an expert in digital identity and digital afterlife.

A calculated cartoon-death that’s ultimately a ploy to sell nuts seems trivial — imagine that — in the wake of what Brubaker called a “shared death.”

“The reality of shared death,” Brubaker said, “[is] it provides a frame of reference around death you don’t want your joke associated with.”

It isn’t uncommon for a brand to dabble in the dark, absurd parts of the internet. There’s a whole host of brand accounts on Twitter that feign depression. That fact can, in part, be attributed to social media managers who understand those parts of the internet and lend that expertise to a company.

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But, as others have theorized, the roots of these morbid jokes made by people — actual people — can be traced back to generational anxiety and exasperation. The jokes are buttressed by real feelings that just... aren’t there... for a commercial about a Mr. Peanut plunging off a ledge.

It makes some sense, then, that Kraft Heinz pulled the plug on its ads in the wake of actual tragedy. Further, there are millions of dollars at stake in Super Bowl ads and Planters probably can't afford to run the real risk of looking tasteless.

“When Kobe Bryant dies, people are legitimately mourning,” said Brubaker, who studies the intersection of death and technology. “Emotional connections exist even if they’re not symmetrical.”

It was that real grief that laid bare how strange it was to use death to sell peanuts in the first place.

As the Super Bowl approaches, some 100 million people will likely soon get to see what's next for Mr. Peanut and the ad campaign centered on the legume's death. Perhaps it'll turn the whole thing around.

One popular theory online is that we'll get a Baby Mr. Peanut, rising to replace the old guard that was killed off. If that's the case, history tells us the baby has until 2124 before it has to worry.

UPDATE: Feb. 2, 2020, 8:08 p.m. EST Planters did, indeed, run its Super Bowl ad on Sunday and it did, indeed, debut a Baby Nut. The 30-second spot shows a tear from the Kool-Aid Man reviving Mr. Peanut (as a baby) while actor Wesley Snipes delivers a graveside eulogy. Yes, really.