Once again, Amazon uses its voice-activated assistant Alexa for laughs with an ad starring talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi, who wonder: “What do you think people did before Alexa?”

The 90-second ad takes views back in time with a series of humorous vignettes showing people, all of whom are named some variant of Alexa, doing everything one of the modern devices can—telling jokes (as an Elizabethian court jester), reading the news (as a Victorian paper boy), and playing music (by blowing into a moonshine jug atop a covered wagon). The ad even pokes fun at Richard Nixon, who’s shown asking an assistant to “remind me to delete those tapes,” something an Alexa device can easily do, but the White House aide didn’t.

Created jointly by Droga5 and Amazon’s in-house team, the third-quarter ad was the company’s fifth consecutive Super Bowl commercial for Alexa. Last year, it ran a star-studded ad from Lucky Generals rhapsodizing about failed Alexa prototypes.

“Before Alexa” also marks DeGeneres’ return to the Super Bowl. In 2014, she starred in an R/GA-created spot for Beats Music.

BRAND: Amazon Alexa

AGENCY: Droga5 and in-house

QUARTER AIRED: Q3

SUPER BOWL: LIV

YEAR: 2020