Chase Bank has a credit card called the Freedom Card. The card is Chase blue, somewhere between twilight and the interior of a geode, and the world around that card, at least in the company’s advertising, is black and white. Black-and-white customers swipe the card at black-and-white supermarkets, drop it on receipts at black-and-white restaurants. The palette of Chase Bank—black, white, blue—is visually distinctive, at least in the short and square world of bank branding: Wells Fargo is Old West and Citibank has a texty whiff of northern Europe; Bank of America is nothing in particular, and who even remembers what Capital One looks like?

Comedy can and does exist within the confines of black and white, but it’s generally a result of intentional pastiche—Zelig, Ed Wood, the entire oeuvre of Guy Maddin—or of a mix of budgetary constraints and indie sympathies—the smart-dumb Forbidden Zone, the dumb-dumb Clerks. Broad comedy is generally best as a big dog of a thing: ungainly, slobbering, literally dirty—a shambling Judd Apatow production, the downright homely work of Harold Ramis. To choose black and white in the mostly-color present is to choose a lap dog over a golden retriever.

A recent and ubiquitous Chase Freedom commercial, “Cash Back Footloose,” stars a lap dog of a man (named Ben Grant, according to the Freedom Facebook page) who wears a crisp gray suit and carries a blue guitar—besides the card, the only color in the ad. He wanders through locations where Chase customers are using their Freedom Cards and sings a parody of the song “Footloose,” from the movie Footloose, in which the lyrics have been changed to enumerate the cash-back rewards of a Chase Freedom Card. This is intended to be comedic, but the starkness of the color palette paired with the mildness of the send-up makes it hard to register the commercial as comedic.

The lyrics don’t help much, either. At a barbershop: “Gettin’ cash back on what? / Close shave and haircut.” In the parking lot of a hardware store, where a man with a dog loads a fan into his truck: “Fan for the ceiling, / you’re gonna cool off that hound.” At a department store: “Tonight you gotta get your cash back / on new slacks.” Cut to a diner, continuing the chorus: “Use Freedom on lunch with Jack. / Everybody get, everybody get.” This bill of goods doesn’t...