A warning sign on Sunset

"Trade Barry!" blared the billboard outside Giants Park, or AT&T Park, or SBC Park, or whatever it's called this week. And on the Sunset Strip, there's dead comedian Chris Farley, his face looking as big as a hot-air balloon, and the phrase "It wasn't all his fault." The Barry billboard -- Barry Bonds, the outfielder for the Giants whose breakfast of champions was allegedly steroids -- was just an April Fool's joke, we're told.

As for Farley, the hilariously physical actor and comic, he's neither a good joke nor a new one. He died eight years ago at 33, drugged out and obese -- nearly 300 pounds. And in L.A., being fat and dead and leaving a bad-looking corpse might be the only real obscenity left -- the ultimate poor lifestyle choice.

So what's Farley doing on the Strip now? Here on this petri dish, this proving ground for all that is new and hip, for almost all our vices and appetites? Here among the iPod ads, the softest-porn Calvin Klein billboards, the pitches for high-end vodka and low-priced beer and men-with-guns movies?

Farley's billboard isn't a nonprofit public service campaign, like the American Cancer Society's TV spot of 20 years ago, when Yul Brynner, dead of lung cancer, spoke virtually from the grave and warned us, "Now that I'm gone, I tell you: Don't smoke." And the "Marlboro Man," 70 feet tall, rode the Sunset Strip for 17 years until his billboard came down in 1999, about the same time the parody billboards were going up, with one cowboy telling the other, "I miss my lung, Bob."

But the Farley billboard is an ad, flat out. It promotes a treatment for cocaine, speed and liquor addictions, using as its pitchman a comedian who yo-yoed in and out of rehab for years. It's something new in the ad avalanche -- for Viagra and its offspring, for nonsense-syllables prescription drugs (Isn't "Levitra" a Harry Potter spell?) -- that sends Americans stampeding to their doctors for prescriptions, and pharmaceutical companies stampeding to the bank with their dough.