It's Just a Booty Call to Action, Baby. GET IT? Eh, CONSUMER? Booty CALL TO ACTION?!? *wink wink nudge nudge*

Do we need humour in Advertising?  Uh... yeah.

I can't even imagine a world where ads were not funny.  That is their most redeeming quality.  If a commercial is going to interrupt the Walking Dead on a Sunday night, it needs to be funny for me not to sear my TV with my angry thoughts.  It needs to be comic relief when Carl is saying something smarmy to the adults who have survived the apocalypse, and I want to just take his cowboy hat and wring it into a ball and set it on fire, because I just hate that character that much.  But I digress. 

What even is funny? That's the deep question of the day.  I'll give you my version.

I don't think humour has to follow a set of rules, in fact it can't.  It doesn't even have to be hilarious.  I think laughing is a reaction to something that is unexpected. We laugh during heated arguments. You react to a punchline because the whole point is that it connects something in your brain that you hadn't connected before. Or it's redundant. Or it's ridiculous. Or it's poignant.  Or it's ironic. Or a bad pun.  So a funny ad can be something that makes you laugh or something that makes you connect two ideas in a clever way which then makes the viewer think for a moment.  Think differently about it. It makes them feel smart, and then they associate that feeling of genius to your product.  Right?

Not a hilarious punchline, but a connection.  GET IT?  BEATLES/BEETLES?  GET IT?

YOU, Consumer, are an INCREDIBLE GENIUS! BUY UP!

For an ad to be devoid of all traces of humour, it would need to be stripped down beyond its very concept or style, and just sort of be there.  I made this to demonstrate, and I think I might have failed because for some reason after posting it, I decided that it was kind of hilarious.  It must just be the unexpectedness of seeing something so stark, but it might actually make a successful campaign.   Take a second, try to get past it and imagine every ad were like that, and always had been.  A product/service and the company's intent.  It would have failed centuries ago, and the world might be different.  The world might be… dull.

Honest, bland cheese slices ad that I made.
Accidentally funny. 

I think that ads teach us to ask why. Why do we need product X or Service Y?  Why should we?  If there isn't a good reason, there should be a funny reason.  We wouldn't need to refine our ability to persuade the way we have if we didn't need to convince other people that our service/product is the best.  It's almost a recipe for a terrible 90s comedy the likes of Liar Liar. *shudder*.  Nobody wants that.  Imagine, Don Draper shows up to his first day and shakes everything up when he draws a chicken on his beer ad.  That's my elevator pitch for a spinoff, everyone.  If John Hamm won't do it, let's get Sandler.  Don't steal my great idea.

He played his own sister and it made it to theatres.
I feel like anything is possible.  Anything.