Abstract:

Humor plays an important role in our daily life. It can bring people pleasure and help them to reduce stress. In business, advertisers also prefer to make use of humor to draw viewers’ attention. However, owing to the cultural differences, sometimes people from different cultures can not understand advertisements properly in other counties. This study intends to investigate the effects humor brings to advertisements by the extensive collection of advertisements in China and America. Then, analyzes the differences and similarities of humor between Chinese and American advertisements from a cross-culture perspective and summarizes their own features. At last this paper suggests that Chinese advertisements learn from American advertisements, and use more humor or humor strategies in advertising.

Key words: humor; advertisement; cross-culture

摘要：

幽默在人们的日常生活中扮演着重要的角色，它能给人们带来轻松欢乐,帮助人们减轻压力。广告商也纷纷运用这一表现手法来吸引观众的眼球。然而由于文化的差异，不同文化背景的人们有时不能理解异国广告。本文通过广泛收集中美两国广告，研究幽默给广告所带来的效果和影响，然后从跨文化的角度分析比较中美两国广告中幽默的异同点，总结其各自的特点。同时也指出中国广告应学习美国广告，将更多的幽默元素应用到中国广告中去。

关键词：幽默; 广告; 跨文化

1. Introduction
Humor, as a means of behavior, touches every aspect of our life. People can always see the humor liberally in all types of advertising in our daily life. The advertisement which performed with humor has unique charm, and the good effect humor brings to it will attract more attention from public. According to the 2013 Nielsen Global Survey of Trust in Advertising, the data show most consumers prefer humorous advertisements to common advertisements. So it is obvious that the unique expression way of humor will help advertisements achieve more benefits. In western countries, America has been proactive in adopting humor to express the purposes of advertising. Humorous advertisements accounts for a great percentage of various advertisements.