Article: Comedy is hard. (Ad/PR).(role of humor in advertising)(Brief Article)

Clumsy jesting is no joke," wrote Aesop in a fable called "The Ass and the Lapdog." A couple of thousand years later, the mass media enable advertisers to become asses on a much larger scale than Aesop could have imagined.

Humor is a powerful but risky tool to use in making one's advertising stand out from the thousands of messages we are said to confront every day. But it is best left in the hands of experts.

"Humor is a funny thing. I say that to my students, then I pause. And none of them ever laughs," said Stephen C. Kopcha, associate professor of advertising at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.

The lack of ...

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