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The commercial, shot with a shaky camera in bad lighting, has a jingle that sounds like it came from a cheap keyboard made and forgotten decades ago.

“At The Red House, where black people and white people buy furniture,” goes the jingle for the South Elm Street store in High Point.

Yes, you just read that correctly.

The 90-second commercial has had a half-million hits on YouTube since it was posted in late April.

“I had never been on YouTube before, to be honest with you, before this,” said Steve Patalano, vice president of the store.

But CNN and TMZ.com picked up the story of the wacky commercial, as did dozens of radio stations nationwide, Patalano said.

The idea came during research that Link Neal and Rhett McLaughlin did to write and shoot the video.

People of all races shop and work there, and the pair found out that the staff had a good sense of humor.

“They just got the idea, that it was just like a big Rainbow Coalition,” Patalano said. 

But it’s true, Neal said. People featured in the video either work or shop there.

There was one embellishment.

“Everything we did, we would try to do it in an awkward way,” Neal said.

Rhett and Link also made commercials about a Cuban gynecologist-turned-car salesman in High Point and a store in Mount Olive.

Those are the mom-and-pop places likely to shoot commercials with small budgets that air late at night.

“We’ve always loved local commercials and considered them an art form in and of themselves,” said Neal, who makes online videos with his childhood buddy McLaughlin, under the name Rhett & Link. The commercial for The Red House was actually from a contract the duo had with a credit report company.

But that’s about as professional as the spots get, according to Neal.

“If you go to their stores, you’ll see that they’re the real deal,” Neal said of the people in the ads. “And they were willing to trust us. They’re the stars of the show.”

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com