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A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Humor is unique. It is universal. Yet, it is idiosyncratic. Attempts at humor may not be perceived as humorous, and humor is often created unintentionally. Something that is funny once may not be funny a second time. Humor can create an immediate and uncontrollable physiological response in the recipient resulting in shortness of breath, and can elevate heart rates to levels similar to exercise. Humor is associated with joy and happiness. It can be used to elevate mood and is associated with positive health benefits. But humor can also be used to insult, disparage, and denigrate. Humor is often offensive. It can be used to marginalize people and to perpetuate racism, sexism, and religious discrimination.
Because of its complexity, some regard the understanding of humor as the last remaining Turing test for artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, humor has long been a challenge for advertisers and for advertising research.
Throughout the early evolution of advertising, many advertisers and ad agencies were reluctant to use humor. In the U.S. this began to change in the post-WW2 period when consumer product output rose quickly and when advertising expenditures tripled from $1.9 billion in 1945 to $5.7 billion in 1950. In addition, television fueled a competition for consumer attention and a creative advertising revolution that gave advertising agencies a new platform and set of tools to express humor. Over time, evidence from academic research and practitioner experience gave credence to the growing use of humor in advertising. However, seventy years later, how, why, and when humor works, or does not work, is still a topic of concern for scholars and advertising practitioners.
The chapters in this book reflect the fact that the use of humor in advertising is a complex global phenomenon. This book includes authors from universities in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and the U.S. Additionally, reviewers for the Special Issue, from which most of these papers were drawn, were located in eight different countries. The papers presented here capture the current state of knowledge in the field across various aspects of humor.
The international nature of humor is exemplified in this book by Gregory and his colleagueâs study of the influence of country and individual cultural perspectives in the U.S. and the Peopleâs Republic of China. The results tell us that simple dichotomies do not easily explain how audiences in these countries react to advertising humor attempts.
Gender differences in response to humor have again become a concern for advertising scholars and practitioners. Two papers in this book directly examine gender differences in humor response. Ivanov, Eisend, and Bayon suggest that there may be an evolutionary basis for gender-specific responses to humorous advertising. However, Mayer, Kumar, and Yoon posit that gender differences regarding reaction to sexual humor can be strategically mitigated.
Two papersâone by Warren, Carter, and McGraw and another by Vermulen, Droog, and Bergersâhighlight the subtle complexity of humor reactions. Warren and his colleagues find that simply being funny is not enough for humorous ads to be effective. Ads that are humorous, but also evoke negative emotions are not successful. Similarly, Vermulen and his colleagues find that the specific timing of humor within a YouTube video overlay ad can impact its effectiveness.
Yoon explores the use of comedic violence in advertising. As marketers continue to seek ways to break through the clutter, some are pushing beyond the historic barriers that kept advertising humor comparatively tame. She finds that comedic violence is more effective for individuals with higher norm beliefs about violence in advertising.
Chang also explores controversial humor in her paper. She examines âprankvertising,â a form of branded entertainment whereby marketers play pranks on unsuspecting consumers. The videos of these pranks are intended to spread virally to convey a product or brand message. She finds that the effectiveness of these pranks hinges on the viewersâ perceptions of the victimsâ expressions and the advertisersâ motives.
This book concludes with a socio-cultural analysis of humor in advertising. This chapter by Weinberger, Gulas and Weinberger examines more than 100 years of outdoor advertising. They reveal a pattern that shows a movement away from warm sentimental humor towards a use of aggressive or sexually themed humor.
This book begins with an updated survey of advertising humor research. While humor is not an advertising panacea Weinberger and Gulas document what we have learned thus far, and outline research that still is needed to help crack the humor code for advertisers.
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ABSTRACT
The use of humour in advertising is widespread and research about it has grown rapidly. There are now at least 250 academic works devoted to advertising humour with over 150 articles, dissertations, books, and major conference papers appearing just since 2000. This article takes stock of the growth of advertising humour research, encompasses an account of the newer research, summarizes what we have learned, thus far, and lays out the dimensions that might be fruitful for future humour researchers. The review reveals a broad and rich array of work that contributes to the historical context, definition, development, effectiveness, and boundary conditions of how, and when, advertising humour works best.
Introduction
This article attempts to document and discuss the growth of advertising humour research with a focus on studies published over the past two decades. Specifically, we focus on five areas: (1) emergence of humour in advertising, (2) the definition and nature of humour, (3) the broadening of advertising humour research, (4) what we have learned so far, and (5) what still needs researching.
This paper is not the first review of the advertising humour literature. However, since research on the topic has expanded significantly since 2000, the earlier reviews no longer adequately cover the state of current knowledge. To conduct this review, we examined JSTOR, Communication Abstracts, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, the Association for Consumer Research Proceedings database and Google Scholar for research on advertising humour, humour in advertising and comedic advertising. Through the end of 2018, this search revealed more than 250 academic works devoted to, or including a substantial portion devoted to, advertising humour. No doubt, there are related articles not found. In addition, the space limitations of this journal article do not allow us to discuss all of the papers we have uncovered in the depth we would like. We focus on major topics and trends in the literature. In addition, to offer a more complete overview of the literature, several additional tables are provided in an online Appendix. This online Appendix contains an outline of all the published advertising humour research by decade (Appendix A), and a selection of cross-cultural studies (Appendix B). Appendix C includes a separate set of references for the additional humour research not discussed in the main paper but listed in the master table in Appendix A.
Emergence of advertising humour
Humour was not always an accepted advertising approach. Its use was viewed with great skepticism in the early years of advertising (Beard 2005; Weinberger, Gulas, and Weinberger 2015), however, its use as an executional tactic grew rapidly after the 1920s in outdoor posters and radio, and later in television in the 1950s (Gulas and Weinberger 2006). Lagging the growth of humour use was empirical analysis of the topic. Beardâs (2005) excellent examination of trade articles over the previous century from Printerâs Ink and other publications regarding the use of humour is one of the few historical studies of advertising humour and shows how views among practitioners evolved over time (for another historical examination see also Wilcox and Moriarty 1984).
Weinberger, Gulas, and Weinberger (2012, 2015) built on Beardâs work by looking at actual humour usage from an archive of award-winning outdoor ads from the mid-1920s to 2010. Their analysis shows the incidence of humour tripled, steadily increasing from only 21% in the 1920s to 66% in the early 2000s. Their work links both the volume of advertising humour and the styles of humour with historical and socio-cultural trends, contextualizing both periods of humour growth and the ebb and flow of various humour executional styles (e.g. racist, sexual, sentimental, etc.).
The growing acceptance of humour by practitioners is documented in a replication by Beard (2008a) of earlier studies of advertising executive opinions about humour usage (Madden and Weinberger 1984; Weinberger and Spotts 1...
