The virtue and shades of aggressive humour in press advertising

Abstract

Disparaging humour may take numerous forms and despite the emotional ambivalence it may occasionally cause, it may prove a valuable quality of an ad. While investigating one hundred multimodal press ads in English that simultaneously make use of metaphor and humour based on an incongruity-resolution mechanism, it was discovered that one-third thereof employed aggressive humour as well (Stwora 2023). Given the high incidence of the aggressive function in these ads, this paper explores this disparaging dimension in more detail to show that various shades of aggressiveness may be perceived as a virtue when used in advertising discourse. The paper advocates a need to consider further sub-categorisations of the aggressive function of humour when applied in advertising to reflect different hostility levels.