Kudos to the new Hewlett-Packard commercials

Some commercials are bulletproof. They work on some level, no matter how ham-handedly they're executed.

But others, often the most imaginative, are like soufflés. They have to be perfect, or they fail completely.

There's a charming new campaign for Hewlett-Packard wihere a Brit-accented fellow is questioning other characters, sometimes nonsensically, but always enough to engender a selling point.

The dialogue isn't haw-haw, just subtly humorous.

And it benefits from the most deft bit of casting I've seen recently, finding a guy who is the perfect equivalent of Eric Idle, the wink-wink-nudge-nudge guy in Monty Python, shown above.

The character is silly, bumptious, naïve, and ingratiating, all at the same time.

With the wrong —or even average— casting, the campaign would fall on its face. But it's executed perfectly. Which was the minimum requirement.