Thursday, March 19, 2009

Comedy = Tragedy +Time?

I'm sitting here, watching the NCAA tournament, when I see a commercial for "kgb" — apparently it is a service where you text in a question and they send an answer.

I looked it up and their full name is "Knowledge Generation Bureau."

Why would you want your information-gathering agency to be known as "kgb"? Is it an intentional reference to the KGB and, if so, is it intended to be funny/cute? If it is intentional, it strikes me as more disturbing than anything else. It's not like naming your company out of something that used to be scary but is now potentially funny/benign, like, say, Vikings. The KGB was a) pretty scary and b) active recently.

What do you think? Too soon?