False Alarm Theory: How Humorous Ads Work

Some ads tickle us and make us laugh. Research shows these ads grab attention, and IF they are well executed, then the liking for the ad washes over onto the advertised brand. Despite E.B. White’s famous wry prediction ("humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process”), humor in advertising has survived extensive dissection, exposing insights into its anatomy, function and origins. Yet it is true that the creation of humorous ads remains a creative process that owes more to intuition than to science. Dr Max Sutherland examines the use of humour in advertising.

It may seem blindingly obvious why funny ads grab attention, why we laugh at them and why we like them. But humor is full of surprises and the bits and pieces of research that I outline here converge on a surprising theory that is not entirely intuitive. It is an explanation of humor that has its roots deep in our evolutionary origins. It helps us understand not just ads that make us laugh but also a wider class of ads that involve closure.

Anatomy

Most humor trades on uncertainty and the large majority of ads that are humorous tickle our funny bones through the use of incongruity or in other words, deviation from expectation. Incongruous humor leads us up the garden path of one interpretation only to undermine it and force us into a reinterpretation as illustrated here in this graphic that might have been an ad for Rabbit Semiconductor (but isn’t).

To illustrate with a TV ad, consider an old TV commercial - one of my all-time favorites. A pet bird is pecking the keys of a home telephone and shortly thereafter a DHL courier comes to collect the sleeping house cat that is unaware of a delivery note stuck to its body. Random pecking by a dumb bird at a telephone turns out to be cunning manipulation that successfully disposes of the cat.

A bird pecking is naturally interpreted as mistaking the phone keys for food and so we are led up the garden path. But only for a moment until we see the courier arrive. To come to the realization that the bird was trying to get rid of the cat, we are forced to backtrack and reinterpret the pecking scene – “Aha! the bird was dialing, not just pecking.” Somewhere in this process, an uncertainty switch flicks on (‘huh?’) to direct attention at resolving the incongruity between the two incompatible concepts (cunning, human-like intelligence and a dumb bird).

This uncertainty switch turns out to be the same one that I dubbed ‘the intruder alarm’ in a column two years ago. (“Capturing Attention by Triggering the Mind's 'Intruder' Alert").

When something seems not quite right in an ad, (e.g. a picture of a dog with technicolor spots), it triggers the mind’s ‘intruder alert’ and captures attention. When humor tricks us into wrong interpretations, this same mechanism is activated to focus attention.

Any stimulus that is related to threat or survival (i.e. ‘adaptively relevant’) triggers this intruder alert including novelty, surprise or any departure from expectation and it can be monitored through the amplitude of brain waves (see Generating Brain Waves that Pierce Attention).

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