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Humour Ad

Humour in Advertising

1. Humour is generally used to evoke the recipients’ attention

Due to the fact that many markets are rather saturated today, many commercials aim rather at the
recipients’ emotional attention than at presenting a product’s features and advantages. In order to
appeal emotionally to the viewer/reader, ads use different strategies. Humour provides one strategy
with which an advertiser may evoke positive feelings. These positive feelings can potentially lead to
cognitive processes that motivate the recipient to buy the presented product. Considering the fact
that involvement during commercial breaks is generally rather low, humour may be an appropriate
means to catch the recipient’s attention.

In order to be able to work with the term “humour”, it needs to be defined. The word itself
originates in Latin, meaning “fluid”; it refers to antique medicine which believed that human tempers
were made up different mixings of bodily fluids (“humores”). Since the 18th century the term is used
in the way we use it today. Humour, though, is something that goes beyond the “simply funny” things
in life. At the moment, there is no consistent scientific definition of humour. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica defines humour as a “form of communication in which a complex, mental stimulus
illuminates, or amuses, or elicits the reflex of laughter”. It is, though, not just a one-dimensional
phenomenon but has rather many facets which have to be differentiated, e.g. comic wit, sentimental
humour, satire, sentimental comedy and comedy (Speck 1990).

This rather large amount of terms standing in context with humour already indicates that there
cannot be one single definition but rather a whole field concerned with this topic. Semantically,
Attardo (1994) has built up this field in the following way:

Looking at this variety of concepts, it should not be too surprising that there is little consensus about
the effects of humorous ads. This is...