Funny Commercials

A man walks out of a bookstore, carrying a bag, and onlookers staring at his bag smile. His bag is printed with a woman’s face, and the part of the bag where his hand slips in (to grasp the handle) is right where the woman’s mouth is. On the bottom right of the bag is a message: “Stop biting your nails?” The bag is a walking ad for a formula that helps grow back nails.

We’ve all seen scenes like this one. Funny advertisements that snatch us, pick us up for short ride, and bring us down surprised. Funny ads are all over the place. On billboards, on packages, in audio, and in video!

In one Swedish commercial, two middle aged men in a sauna sit side by side, presumably naked, but viewers see only their chests and faces. One man sleeps as the other leans in to stare at the other’s crotch. The sleeping man wakes up, catches his embarrassed seatmate, but nudges for the other to go on. So the other leans in and picks up… the newspaper on the other man’s lap.

Humor, novelty, misdirection, and shock value are all woven together to get people’s attention, and the people, in the span of a few seconds, intuit the message, admire the medium, and retain the message longer than the news they read this morning.

A taco vendor down the road is named Gory, so she names her taco stand, “Gory Tacos.” Sometimes funny advertisements don’t intend to be funny. It is what it is and a context that the people who put up those ads seem to have missed fills in the details.

It doesn’t matter what medium is used, visual, video, audio, these funny ads get their strength from people’s fixed expectation