"Live from New York - it's Perillo, er, Romano Tours."
Yes, Saturday Night Live featured a four-minute segment last weekend with comedian Adam Sandler that mimicked a Perillo Tours commercial. It was a parody of the longstanding Perillo Tours commercials inaugurated by Mario Perillo and carried on by his son Steve Perillo, the current CEO.
As Steve Perillo told TravelPulse, the segment was a dead-on duplication of a real commercial except for the use of the name Romano. He said, "they got every pixel right including the colors, fonts, shade of my suit and comments from customer testimonials, which were identical to real commercials."
He said the bit came as "a total surprise."
It turns out, said Perillo, that there are no legal issues with a parody of this type as long as the product name is not mentioned. Perillo took the commercial in good form, saying "After 84 years in business, it looks like we made it."
He said his dad would have gotten a kick out of it.
Perillo did not see the show because he goes to sleep at 9:30 but "people started texting me like crazy that night and the next morning."
He still does many commercials though, he said, "my father was more impressive when he did them." He said he guesses he's been on the air enough to parody.
The SNL version of the Perillo commercial did not make fun of the company specifically but more of travel in general. With a tagline of "still sad," Sandler kept pointing out that if you're sad at home you will still be sad when you're in Italy. Similarly, "pictures taken of you will make you look the same as you do at home."
Perillo said there is something to that but the best thing about travel is that it lets you see your life back home from a distance. You always think you will come back home and change your patterns or spend more time with someone. Even if that doesn't happen, he said, you still see yourself more clearly.
Travel also creates sparks - romantic or otherwise, said Perillo. Recently, he said, a college student told him she was conceived in Sorrento on a Perillo tour.
Interestingly, Perillo Tours was mentioned on SNL in the '90s when a cast member said, "What do you think, you're on a Perillo tour or something?" "Dad was very proud of that," said Perillo.
Business to Italy is good, said Perillo, with all programs up. Tours have changed with the experiential phenomenon, he said, as travelers now do olive oil tastings or even olive oil tours. But overall, he has learned that "the travel business is a roller coaster."
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