This is what TV advertising aimed at men looked like, circa 2003: Two fetching young women, sitting in an outdoor cafe, begin to argue about the merits of Miller Lite beer. The argument quickly escalates into a hair-pulling, clothes-ripping brawl. The women, now half-naked, tumble into a fountain, then somehow wind up rolling around together in wet cement. The naughty male fantasy concludes with one saying to the other, "Let's make out!"

And this is what it looks like, circa 2005: A bunch of young guys, sitting around watching the game, realize they have run out of beer. To make it to the store and back before the action resumes, one of them tears out of the living room, races through a neighbor's house, jumps over a fence and hitches a ride on the back of a galloping police horse. He arrives at the market in time to grab the last six-pack of Miller Lite, just as another young man, on an identical mission, comes barreling into the store.

The difference between busty, battling babes and sprinting slackers tells a larger tale about male-oriented TV advertising these days. Not so long ago, commercials tailored to guys pushed a few predictable buttons — sex, certainly, but also a kind of aggressive and crude frat-house humor. Bud Light — to pick another prominent marketer to the football-watching demographic — ran a series of commercials during Super Bowl 2004 that featured a dog that bit a man's crotch, a monkey that propositioned a woman, and a horse that passed gas in a couple's face.

Now, the rude menagerie is gone and so, for the most part, is the female skin. You won't find the Swedish Bikini Team or Coors Light's winking, rock 'n' roll odes to "those twins!" during breaks in the game nowadays.

Instead, TV advertising to guys has gone tame. And often lame.

Now the prevailing theme of commercials airing during Sunday afternoon football games is an old advertising staple: men as the butt of the joke. Men acting silly. Men humiliating themselves or being humiliated by others.

Here, for example, is a spot for the Ford Fusion, a new sedan: A schlubby guy totters down his driveway, hauling an armload of messy trash to the curb. Glancing up, he discovers that he's a moment too late; he has just missed the garbage truck. "This is life," proclaims the ad. "This is life in drive" (cut to beauty shots of the car).

Or the commercial for Citibank: A guy undertakes a search for a missing credit-card statement that becomes so frantic and self-absorbed that he falls into a trash can and doesn't even notice when the can is picked up and carried off by a garbage hauler. In another Citibank commercial a guy chases his statement into an air vent — and gets locked inside.

Advertisers and ad creators say their pullback from sex and raunch was made after Janet Jackson's infamous display of nudity during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The backlash was aimed not just at Jackson and CBS, which telecast the game, but at advertisers like Anheuser-Busch, which aired the rowdy Bud Light crotch-biting/sex-starved-monkey/gas-passing-horse series during the game.