Watch This Bank Break the Fourth Wall in Hilarious Fashion

Banks are inherently not funny. They take your money and give it back to you when asked. They make loans. They exchange currency. And when they do it all correctly, nobody’s laughing.

Commercials for banks are often just as dull: Close-up of well-groomed man in business suit. Visual overlay of statistics. Racially diverse group of men and women talking animatedly in a boardroom. Overlay of more statistics. Smiling people shaking hands. Logo of bank.

Fortunately, there’s Nordnet, a Scandinavian bank, to add some much-needed humor to the drab landscape of banking ads. In a series of four short videos, Nordnet lampoons typical banking ads with some self-referential meta-humor that is genuinely clever.

“Hello, I’m an actor, and I’ve been paid $8,000 to tell you how great Nordnet is compared to other banks,” says, well, an actor, in the series’ most popular video:

The generic actor has a lot of fun breaking the fourth wall. “I walk fast through a hallway where I read from a prompter on top of a camera,” he exclaims. “It says that Nordnet has lower fees, a better platform, and that they push less of their own products.” He then shakes hands (for too long) and laughs (stiffly) with another actor before saying, “Apparently business is going well.” Indeed.

There are four videos in all, and the next best one—at least for us in the advertising world—takes a shot at marketing regulations, as the actor is admonished by someone off-camera for saying that Nordnet is the world’s best place to invest (“No, no, no, you can’t say that—you have to say one … of … the … best”).

Later, he’s baffled by a script that instructs him to tell viewers to trust random people on the Internet with all their savings. The acting is universally awful, but that’s the point.

Unsurprisingly, people love these anti-ad ads, which have earned over a half million views on YouTube in two weeks. That’s certainly a rarity for the financial sector. Even rarer? This ultra-positive endorsement from a YouTube commenter:

As a marketer, what better result could you hope for than that?