Humor in the Advertising Business: Theory, Practice, and Wit offers any reader who studies, teaches, creates, approves or simply enjoys humorous advertising a concise but thorough exploration of what advertising humor is and what advertisers hope to accomplish with it. As one of advertising’s most frequently used message tactics (U.S. advertisers alone may spend as much as $60 billion a year in the optimistic belief they can make their audiences laugh!), humor is an admittedly complicated topic. Attempts at advertising humor that leave some people rolling on the floor often leave others scratching their heads in confusion, if not actually insulted.

Much of Humor in the Advertising Business is organized around the model you can see below, which shows that three humor theories or mechanisms generate the humor in five types of funny ads. This model and its concepts--based on the theoretical and research contributions of many researchers and scholars (you can see these sources by clicking on the "Funny Ad References" link)--offers a valuable framework for helping us understand one of the most complicated phenomena there is: Why people laugh.

Illustrated with dozens of the world’s funniest ads, insights from advertising’s most successful creative strategists and artists, and decades of academic research—Humor in the Advertising Business presents an exploration of the history of modern advertising’s silly sell and the research- and practice-based principles behind its uses and effects. But you’ll find more than a dry, theoretical and practical explanation of advertising humor in this book. If you're one of those people who has chuckled or even laughed out loud at an advertiser’s wit (and, really, who hasn’t?), you'll appreciate this highly readable homage to what may be the only kind of advertising most people consider a reasonable reward for reading, watching or listening to an advertiser’s sales pitch.

Download an Adobe Acrobat Version of the book's Introduction

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