A Speech-Act Approach To Humor In Advertisements

Humor, as a unique and typical way of communication for human beings, is a spirit, an attitude of life, and a symbol of human intelligence. Without it, life would become featureless and colorless. Humor not only creates a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere in our daily life, but also exists as an art form in many fields with measurable success. Humorous text message goes viral, hilarious comic books fly off the shelves, and comedians are hot products wherever they go. Advertisement is of no exception. As society progresses, people suffer from some mental stress for a new lifestyle. In order to meet people's aesthetic and psychological needs, advertisement is transforming from a single rigid structure into a novel, flexible and diverse model. Under these circumstances, humorous advertisement has developed. It brings witticism, self-mockery, enjoyment, and other techniques into advertising. At the same time, the original intentions of the businesses are concealed rather than exposed. A humorous advertisement not only eliminates feelings of resistance from potential consumers, and narrows the distance between consumers and products, but also keeps the audience enjoying this carefree mood. In short, modern advertisements implant recognition of the product in the subconsciousness through humorous way, thus to achieve the final intention to purchase. Advertisement, as the carrier of humor in the thesis, is a flexible, nuance and eloquent way of communication, and few other ways can rival.Originated from the Aristotle era, the study on humor has attracted the attention of the scholars from multi-disciplines. Since the 1950s, following the rapid development of pragmatics and semantics, the explanation of humor phenomenon has achieved unprecedented successes. Besides the researches on humor theory, the applied study on humor, including the humorous utterance in oral communication, the humorous text in famous works, and subtitles translation of humorous films, has begun to make a conspicuous figure. At present, the studies on humor focus on the verbal material with these approaches of Cooperation Principles and Relevance Theory. This thesis chooses a relatively new approach - Speech Act Theory, to analyze the humor in advertisements.This thesis intends to employ the approach of Speech Act Theory to analyze the considerable examples of humor in advertisements. Based on three-division of Speech Act Theory: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, it respectively explains the production of humor in advertisements. The findings of this thesis are able to provide some effective suggestions to appreciate the humor in advertisements. In addition, it makes a tentative exploration for the application of humor to advertising design directed by Speech Act Theory, and puts forward some possible strategies to achieve the humorous effect in advertisements.