Marketing: You must be Joking

Marketing, in its bid to be a serious discipline, has largely avoided theorising about humour in the marketplace. This is especially surprising given the increase in humorous ads over the last two decades or so. This paper seeks to address this omission by analysing humour in advertising with particular reference to Budweiser’s series of Lizards' advertisements. The paper considers the phenomenon at different levels of analysis. We argue that humorous advertisements are suited to contemporary media and advertising environments, and that such advertisements are a natural offshoot of the prevailing postmodernist mood. Humour possesses many traits of postmodernity–fun, irony and parody, and is therefore in step with this mood. Finally, humour is considered as an alternative to postmodernity, in so far as it reaches parts that other discourses, such as the discourse of postmodernity, cannot reach.