When the Utah State Fair yanked director's "offensive" ads

Fifteen years ago this week, the Utah State Fair opened to allegations of racism and prudishness after its governing board pulled two goofy TV ads produced by "Napoleon Dynamite" director Jared Hess.

• This is Old News, where we put Utah's archive footage on the projector.

What was inside: The ads featured a Black soul singer rhapsodizing about a pig's ham hocks and deep-fried funnel cake batter ("You're so smooth and so creamy").

What drove the news: The ads went semi-viral online, and the fair board removed them from YouTube and took them off the air just as the fair was beginning.

What they said: "We felt that the ads didn't meet the demographics that we felt need to happen," fair board chair Loren Moench told The Salt Lake Tribune. "We are trying to get families to come to the fair and to represent the agriculture interests of the state."

• "Other board members and some people called in and said they felt they were offensive," he told the Deseret News.

The intrigue: The fair board allowed the commercials' audio to remain on the air as radio ads.

Between the lines: "They're identical, but you can't see the actor. You do the math," Hess told the Tribune, arguing that the ad was pulled because the actor was Black.

The other side: Moench later told the Deseret News that the decision "had nothing to do with race or the actor or anything like that."

• "It was just the mannerisms and such, with the pig and things such as that.… It's on the edge and we don't want that," he said.

The bottom line: After paying $22,000 for Hess' ad campaign, the fair board replaced it with a commercial that showed a girl grooming a cow.

The latest: The 2025 Utah State Fair opened Thursday.