Ad-ribbing

You know how Barry and Eliot Tatelman, a.k.a. the Jordan's Furniture guys, always needle each other in their TV commercials? Turns out, the sibling raillery never -- ever -- ends, even after the director (a tall, tan guy named Rich Sturchio) yells "Cut!" Last month, I watched from the sidelines for a day as they shot four new spots at Cramer, a Norwood-based production company that makes commercials and corporate events.

The Cramer building, a boxy light-green structure on a long road of office parks, looks like a pack of wintergreen gum. Or at least it does at 8 a.m., which is the ungodly hour this shoot is slated to start. Where do you get the coffee?

After sleepwalking into the cafeteria, I discover not Barry and Eliot but two teenage actresses, the scratchy-voiced Francesca Little and redheaded Aislyn Emerson (who will later deliver the immortal line "Does this chair make me look fat?"). Soon Barry walks in, says hello, and reports that one of the new ads has a joke about the 58-year-old Eliot's ponytail, because "it drives me insane." Then Barry, who is 54, goes: "So Eliot doesn't talk to me for a month or two. It's not a problem." Eventually Eliot arrives, and everyone repairs to the recording studio for voice-over work. It's a cool environment: dim 1970s-rock lighting, a recording booth, a big sound mixer, a computer that periodically flashes squiggly red and green lines. Unfortunately, the laid-back atmosphere can't stop Barry from over-acting. And Eliot, whose all-black ensemble adds a touch of gravitas to his jovial personality, is ecstatic that the director keeps asking his brother to do retakes. "I'm loving this!" he says to Sturchio. "What did I promise you, 50 or 100 bucks?"

The ribbing is of the good-natured, fraternal variety. "You know, we're brothers," says Barry. "We're family first, and the business is second."

Then it's off to the set -- imagine a nicely appointed living room surrounded by big white lights, cables, a camera, monitors, various wisecracking crew members -- where everyone gets involved in the shtick. To producer Lisa Downes, who spent a few unhappy moments scraping gum off Eliot's shoe, Barry says: "When you're done, can you get my laundry?" And Sturchio, who helps Barry script the commercials, notes that "Eliot gets the lines with the training wheels." Of course, the "Tatelmen" know that sometimes the kidding can go too far, and so Barry informs me that Heather Copelas, Jordan's PR person, who apparently endures endless teasing from the brothers, "deserves an award. She's the lee-eye-son between us two."

But the real laughter comes from the new advertisements, which cleverly parody the Citibank "identity theft" commercials and which started airing as August merged with September. (Barry and Eliot exchange voices with, first, the teens and then with two older women.) I ask Little how she feels about working with the guys. "I'm wicked excited about meeting them," she says.

In truth, don't we all feel as if we know these guys by now? Barry and Eliot are sort of like our crazy uncles, if we had uncles we saw only on television, and they were always hawking furniture or promoting some charity and tended to mock each other and various forms of TV advertising. Thanks to those ubiquitous Jordan's ads (more than 500 have been broadcast since the mid-1970s), the majority of Greater Boston's residents have the Tatelman faces and voices stored permanently on their internal hard drives. Just hearing the words "at Jawdan's Furniture" is enough to give you a Barry-and-Eliot flashback.

Asked about the sort of response the ads get, Barry talks about one commercial that involved some on-camera gymnastics. He was walking with a friend in the Prudential Center days after the ad first aired, and 20 people came up to him and asked, "Did you really do that flip?"

Says Barry: "We know it's working as long as they're talking about it."

And their fame sometimes leaks outside the area. One time they were in Las Vegas, on Halloween night, and a passerby saw them and said, "Those two guys are dressed up like Barry and Eliot!" To which someone else responded: "Who are Barry and Eliot?"

Good question.

Theirs is an oft-old story. They're entrepreneurs, philanthropists, obsessive self-promoters -- a pair of locally raised Jewish hams. Barry studied advertising at Boston University and is the creative force behind the commercials. (These ads cost a mere 1.5 percent of the company's gross revenues, which is good, Barry says, noting, "Most furniture stores spend anywhere from 5 to 12 percent on advertising.") Eliot focuses on the daily details of the Jordan's operation. And they know how to diversify: Barry has just become a Broadway producer -- he's working on a musical production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring John Lithgow -- and Eliot runs, with his wife, Camp Miracles and Magic, a summer camp for kids with HIV/AIDS.

Oh, and as if there were any doubt, they also make some money. In 1999, they sold their business to Warren Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway for a reported $225 million in cash, but they continue to keep the furniture trucks running (Barry is the CEO, and Eliot is the president). Jordan's did just under $300 million in sales last year. With each commercial costing only $15,000 to $35,000, it's no wonder that they keep cranking these things out quicker than a Curt Schilling fastball. (The brothers keep the price down by providing the talent and writing their own lines -- and having a company's president and CEO so involved in the commercials means that decisions can be made quickly.)

As the afternoon wears on, about the only time the laughter seems to fade comes late in the day. One of the older actors has trouble lip- synching her lines: to the tune of 47 temple-throbbing takes. Everyone tries to be supportive and reassure her that lip-synching is hard work, but the set is getting visibly tense. At one point, Barry and the producer have a quick discussion about having the actresses switch parts. Barry's glasses are pushed down on his nose, in a kind of Ben Franklin pose, and he's not smiling.

Eliot, who had left the set for a while to take care of some furniture business, shows up and asks, "How's it going?"

"Great," says Sturchio. Then he adds, sotto voce: "We're struggling a little bit right now with one of the older women." Eventually, Downes writes up some cue cards, and with these visual aids and a great deal of patience, they get the shot. (Barry would call me days later with an update on the commercial: "We edited a lot, so it came out pretty good.")

In the end, Barry and the director get up to go watch some videotape from earlier in the day. After a beat, Eliot notices and jumps up to join them. "You don't have to come, Eliot," says Sturchio. So what does he do? Storm off the set? Can the director? Wrestle his brother? "It's OK," he says, as if he's addressing a television audience. "I know my place. Where's the broom?"

Ken Gordon is a freelance writer living in Newton. He edits JBooks.com, a website for Jewish books. His e-mail address is ken_gordon@comcast.net.