Humour in advertising is a serious business

Since 2020, the number of ads that use humour as a creative strategy has dropped from more than half to a measly 34% globally across all channels. 

Sure, we are living in difficult times, which can lead to playing it safe for fear of being out of step with the cultural mood or, heaven forbid, being cancelled. But now more than ever, creatives need to be reminded that humour is a superpower in terms of effectiveness and cutthrough.

Research shows that humour is the most powerful way to get people on board with your brand message. Everyone finds something funny. It is a universal emotion that joins us all.

The best humour comes when you are at the edge, pushing the boundaries. None other than Sigmund Freud was on the money when he said that laughter allows people to let off steam or release pent-up “nervous energy”.  It’s why jokes about controversial topics work; when the punchline comes, the energy being expended to suppress inappropriate emotions is no longer needed and is released as laughter.

People will laugh when something defies their expectations or grasp a double meaning and see something in a new light.

It’s why TBWA MCR chose humour for the serious message of prostate cancer checks. 

Using billboards, we showed giant close-ups of where a prostate check is taken from…the arm. Of course, the creative was made to look like giant hairy bums – hence nervous energy release, lots of laughs and a serious message conveyed through humour.

Humour may be a universal emotion, but it is subjective, so it’s important to choose your humour wisely—one size doesn’t fit all. Humour is highly context-driven. Some of what people found funny in previous decades no longer works—people’s perception of what is funny evolves with the times.

It’s within the bounds of this subjectivity that creative advertising needs to find its funny bone, because being funny is a serious business that can have seriously good rewards.

But it’s not easy. 

It’s hard to get that perfect set-up, that perfect punchline or pay off. 

Humour lives in so many more places now, especially since I started. Where stand-up, sit-coms, sketch shows, and late nights on Channel 4 were once the "go-to" for inspiration, now we can add memes by the million, viral films, TikTok trends every two seconds, and thousands of YouTube content creators to the list. All of these are great, but they can make it tricky to stay current, to stay relevant.

But all of this is part of our craft and we should all get more serious about being funny.

So, how do we sharpen our humour pencil at TBWA MCR? We’ve just started a monthly "What's So Funny" session with creatives, where they bring a reference to something funny to share, helping build a "humour bank" of references. It could be anything – a piece of stand-up, scene from a film, a meme, an ad, a greetings card, the latest dancing cat, bird, lemur…anything.

It gets our heads out of work deadlines for a little while – never a bad thing – and means we all benefit from a wider reference "bank" of what’s funny in the world right now. All good stuff that hopefully the brands we work on will benefit from, too.

Brands that know their target audience well, and that means more than knowing their socio-economic status, age and gender, will bring them on board with humour.

Of course, some will worry about the C-word (please don’t cancel me), but this can be navigated by knowing what makes your audience laugh and tailoring the gag for the channel.

Being funny as a brand has the potential to be as risky as doing a stand-up routine for the first time in a prison full of Category A prisoners before a parole meeting. Get it wrong, and my god, you’re going to get shivved with the sharp end of a toothbrush…metaphorically speaking. 

Or just plain ignored, which, arguably, in a time when everyone has an opinion and a platform to shout that opinion, probably stings a bit more.

Again, this is why you need to know your brand and your audience before you start cracking the jokes.

Paddy Power is an exemplar of this. It recognises that brands cannot be funny in their advertising if it isn’t part of their DNA. Their funny formula starts with a cultural, societal truth and is then layered on with a self-deprecating, insightful, revealing piece of humour. 

The audience gets it and knows it is coming. There’s no need to go straight in with the gag.

As Kantar research shows, linking humour to the brand is an important part of the puzzle. There is no direct relationship between humour and remembering the brand, even when the humour is laugh-out-loud funny. When the brand is at the centre of the joke, the branded memorability can be incredibly strong.

So, a creative, a client, and a planner walked into a bar. They went for the funny, and their clients, customers, and the world said "thank you" (just a little bit) for it. 

And as the late, great Bill Hicks would say, "yeh yeh, you’re just going for the humour dollar", and he’d be right, but at least we made the people smile all the way to the checkout. 

Lisa Nichols is the executive creative director of TBWA MCR.