Jeff Aron Lable knows what it's like to stand in an agency library and stare listlessly at a pile of reels. During his tenure at Los Angeles's Ground Zero, he and his fellow creatives logged countless manhours bemoaning the relatively lackluster state of the average American spot director. "There were hundreds and hundreds of reels, but we still had a really difficult time finding ones that were smart and made us laugh out loud," he recalls. "For some reason only the top-tier guys did that; everyone else was funny, just not laugh-out-loud funny."

It's an inequity that Lable (now with Go Film) has taken it upon himself to address. Earlier this year, he abandoned his cushy AD gig at Ground Zero for the comparatively unpredictable life of a comedy director. So far, so good: buoyed by a four-spot spec reel that might variously be described as "boundary pushing", "possibly a bit off-color", "fantastically offensive", and, yes, "laugh out-loud funny", the 30-year-old has managed to generate an encouraging amount of interest.

A lot of that has to do with his spec strategy; standing in stark contrast to more typical beginner work, which tends to use beer, videogames and athletic apparel as a pretense for pretty pictures and capable shotmaking, Lable's reel is a raft of dark humor that's as likely to elicit big belly laughs as it is shock and awe. But whether in the Naturalmarket.com spot that shows an elderly man shrugging off the erection-giving qualities of his arthritis medication long enough to play soccer with his grandson, the MTV-branded 'Stay In School' PSA that doubles as an inmate dating service video or the ESPN piece that shows a man amping up for deviant sex with his mascot-costumed girlfriend (tagline: "Fall in love with college football again"), Lable says his work isn't merely about racking up shock points. "I wanted to have a reel that really stood out, where each spot made you uncomfortable and made you laugh," he says. "But I also wanted to make something that was smart and sold the product."

And while Lable knows from firsthand experience that the subject matter broached on his reel won't fly in the regular agency landscape, he hopes that his risqué humor and sharp creative will be enough to pique creatives' curiosity. After all, it's not just about being gratuitous; it's about finding new and potentially disarming ways to make the product and the message connect. "When I see these other spots on TV that say, 'stay in school so you can make 8% more than a non-high school graduate', I'm like, 'That's not really going to speak to kids that aren't going to graduate high school'," he says. "To me, the [prospect] of being that [inmate's] girlfriend is a much better reason not to drop out."

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