The six ways humour can make us more successful
by Bridget Angear
Thanks to analysis carried out by the IPA, Kantar and others, we can now say with a high degree of confidence that humour is a powerful way to create fame-driving communications. And thanks to various psychological studies we also understand more about how and why humour works. In layman terms, it activates a part of the brain’s reward system giving us a dopamine hit, which both makes us feel good and means we tend to remember better things that have made us laugh.
Humour can of course come in many different guises, and advertisers use it in many different ways - a topic I was discussing with Adam Morgan for his podcast series ‘Let’s Make This More Interesting’. Drawing from our experience, we discussed several different ways we had seen humour used successfully. Adam then referred to an academic article that had identified four different types of humour, which got us thinking about how well the different types of humour we had identified as practitioners, and the value they offered us, mapped against these four academic ones.
Our main conclusion is that we believe they essentially do – although, as we will go on to say, we think there are two additional roles and values of humour for brands and businesses that we think are worth adding to it as well.
The four types of humour proposed in the academic article were:
Affiliative humour - based on relatable situations in everyday life.
Self enhancing humour - laughing gently at ourselves when something goes wrong.
Aggressive humour – teasing, mocking and ridicule at someone else’s expense.
Self defeating humour - putting ourselves down and amusing others at our own expense.
Let’s explore these four, and the additional two we’re proposing adding to the model for advertising.
A: Affiliative Humour
Affiliative humour is essentially laughing at relatable situations. Probably the most commonly used type of humour in advertising, its value to us is to build empathy with our audience, a connection between them and us. Often based on observations of daily life that make us laugh (even slightly cringe) with the embarrassment of the situation. Pampers’ ‘Poonami’ is a good example of this: every parent has experienced the fear of a nappy ‘fail’ and having to deal with the ‘fallout’. The Uber Eats ad with Robert de Niro makes us laugh because we can imagine finally meeting our screen idol and then being totally lost for words.
Affiliative humour creates a connection by showing our audience that we understand them, and have at some level common values with them.
B. Self-enhancing humour
Self enhancing humour is a close bedfellow of affiliative humour. Laughing at ourselves tends to make others like us more, as we like those who don’t take themselves too seriously. In advertising, this kind of humour can come from creating characters who seem to be taking things very seriously indeed, as the reaction from the audience is to laugh at them. Yorkshire Tea has fun with their own ‘Yorkshireness’, an exaggerated earnestness for doing things ‘properly’. Sterling Gravitas, the character in the ‘Tena For Men’ campaign is a hyperbolic take on a man who is in control of all aspects of his life in order to suggest that Tena men can take control of bladder leakage. Dos Equis’ ‘The most interesting man in the world’ and Old Spice’s ‘Smells like a man’ work in a similar way.
And part of the value of such exaggeration and hyperbole is that it enables brands to make claims they might otherwise not be allowed to make.
C. Aggressive Humour
Aggressive humour can be challenging for marketeers, often for fear of getting it wrong and inadvertently insulting their audiences - although one obviously sees challenger brands sometimes using it very effectively to amplify their differences versus a market leader. Think of Wendy’s (‘Fresh, never frozen’) social media campaign in the US, for instance, calling out McDonald’s for using frozen burgers.
Image: Specsavers
Brands obviously need to consider carefully here about who is the butt of their jokes and whether it is ok to mock or ridicule them. The Walkers “No more Mr Nice guy’ campaign had endless fun with ways in which Gary Lineker came a cropper, and he could take it. Celebrities were fair game.
But when this type of humour is done well, it can be very powerful. “Should have gone to Specsavers” and Snickers’ ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ both poke fun at those who have not benefitted from their product. The category generics of needing glasses or energy so you don’t make mistakes are elevated to something altogether more memorable using humour – and, perhaps, help allow the consistency of communication that recent work has shown to be so valuable: everyone loves a new twist on a familiar joke.
D. Self-defeating humour
Image: Hans Brinker
The Hamlet campaign “Happiness is a cigar named Hamlet” from the 1960’s is a classic example of self-defeating humour in advertising. The protagonist is portrayed as a loser with the brand coming in as a consolation prize. This explicit style of advertising seems to have gone out of fashion, perhaps because no-one wants their brand to be seen as ‘for losers’, although the Hans Brinker hotel ads from The Netherlands (‘It can’t get any worse, but we’ll do our best’) use it well to celebrate a no-frills hospitality offer in a surprising but engaging way.
But we also see a more nuanced value for this kind of humour where a brand deliberately takes a low status play – the brilliant Molson ‘I am Canadian’ ad, for instance, is a more recent example where the protagonist builds to a passionate rant about all the misconceptions people have about Canada and its people, and then punctures the climactic emotional close with an apology at the end.
And to these four types of humour we’d add two more:
E. Absurdity
Absurdity is an engaging silliness that we cannot help but laugh at. When we see a gorilla playing the drums we laugh because it is ludicrous. Incongruous. Absurd. So too a pony dancing, or meerkats speaking in a Russian accent.
Along with the pure entertainment of the absurdity, often the value here is surprise. A surprise that makes the communication memorable in itself, and obviously also much more shareable.
But surprising absurdity is not just for confectionery or potentially commoditised categories: it can also be as a fresh way to get people to engage with a very serious subject, as it was in Australia with Dumb ways to die.
F. Disarming humour
And what of the humour sometimes deployed to tackle taboos, poking fun at them and helping remove any shame associated with them? The world of standup comedy today is much richer in terms of subject matter than it was thirty years ago: comedians are frequently covering very serious, often personal subject matter through comedy to large audiences. Humour has the ability to both help the individual get through a difficult emotional time, and also bring subjects into the open that might otherwise be seen as difficult to talk about.
Strictly speaking, this might be seen as a value for humour rather than a type of humour, but it is being used so powerfully in communications we felt it merited a place of its own. Whether we see it in the gentle humour used in the Co-op funeral ad, in which a discussion between friends and family around the type of funeral they would (and wouldn’t) like helps normalise the conversation around death and dying, or breaking taboos around women’s periods, it brings the hidden into the light, and makes the previously difficult possible.
My work with the IPA on the Business Case for Being Funny shows the remarkable commercial impact that humour can bring our brand and communication. Perhaps we should start being more strategic about which kind of humour we need, and the value we want it to bring as well.
