| Humor, as a special genre, plays an important role in people's daily life. It can create friendly liveliness, bring fun and happiness and relieve anxiety and stress. Due to its functions, humor abounds in our life including advertisements. It has been found that "happiness" and "having fun" is of great commercial value, so humor has long been a popular technique for advertising in various cultures. However, what is deemed funny in one country would be considered stupid or misunderstood altogether in another. In this sense, humor is strongly culture-bound and can rarely be independent from its culture.From a cross-cultural perspective, by using descriptive and comparative approaches, the current study endeavors to compare similarities and differences between Chinese and English advertisement humor and to explore the causes rooted in Chinese and English cultures, thus lending a support to native target audience (Chinese or Western) for a better understanding of advertisement humor in another culture and to make a smarter choice of purchase. As regards to functions and techniques, Chinese and English advertisement humor shares some commonalities. However, advertisement humor in each culture has its special preference for topics and the joking objects. It can be found that different values, different thinking modes and different historical and cultural backgrounds between Chinese and English cultures all account for these differences. What's more, some advice on how to bridge the gap is offered in this study—to understand differences between Chinese and English cultures, to improve empathy and to contextualize advertisement humor.With the rapid growth of economic globalization, cross-cultural advertising becomes indispensible and inevitable. Whether advertisements are acceptable to local consumers largely depends on advertisers' awareness of target audience's cultural perception. The current study may offer some enlightenment at this point.
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