Humor appreciation is a psychological response that occurs when a situation or a stimulus is perceived to be humorous. The authors review different conditions that scholars have proposed lead to humor appreciation, including surprise, simultaneity, violations, and a benign appraisal. Although...

Humor is a common goal of marketing communications, yet humorous advertisements do not always improve consumer attitudes towards the advertised brand. By investigating a potential downside of attempting to be humorous, our inquiry helps explain why humorous ads can fail to improve, and...

Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory — which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay — to examine how being humorous...