ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ADVERTISING HUMOR
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32689/maup.philol.2025.1.13Keywords:
humor, irony, socio-professional jokes, advertising, cognitive patternsAbstract
This article presents stylistic, cognitive and pragmatic analyses of a sample of English-language jokes about advertising and its variants. An analysis of the forms of 115 jokes sourced from four English-language websites shows that the most frequent forms of jokes about advertising are question/answer formats (60.8%), one-liner jokes (39.2%). A detailed study of 20 advertising-related jokes highlights the most frequent use of stylistic devices such as puns, fake enthusiasm, paraprosdokian, pastiche, bathos and irony. Other techniques include personified and zoomorphic metaphors, nonstandard similes, false argumentation (enthymeme), antithesis, are involved. From a cognitive perspective, the jokes apply cognitive mechanisms like the «deformation professionale», «von Restorff pattern», «distinct contrast» and «easel» patterns, switching of which leads to the incongruity mechanism and comic effect. Pragmatically, these jokes serve multiple purposes: they help students to relieve psychological stress, encourage creative and critical thinking, entertain, introduce readers to English-speaking advertising practices and techniques, and foster an appreciation of humor and irony. Besides, they motivate people to be successful and confident, while shaping stereotypical images of English-speaking advertising professionals, contributing to the development of intercultural and cultural competences. The advertising jokes form the stereotypical image of an advertising professional as a creative and smart, multifunctional and cynical, rude and highly skilled specialist in philology and psychology. The stereotypical image of an advertising professional carries out a number of functions.1. The function of emotional trigger, because it tunes the audience into humorous tonality. 2. The function of the fast assimilation of the created image and simplified perception of it. 3. The function of funny labeling of advertising specialists. 4. The linguistic function of transforming the language towards expressivity and flexibility.
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