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Effectiv­e Use of Puns in Print Advertis­ements - A Detailed Analysis

6.418 Words / ~19 pages sternsternsternsternstern_0.25 Author Patrik P. in Mar. 2012
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RWTH Aachen Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule

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2008, Kerz

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Table of Contents

I. Introduction 2

II. Relevant terminology 3

Puns 3

Homophony 4

Polysemy 4

Homonymy 4

III. Ambiguity, Vagueness and the Theory of Relevance 5

IV. The Four Categories of Puns according to Tanaka 8

IV.I Nonsensical puns 8

IV.II Contextual puns 10

IV.III Puns and sexual innuendo 12

IV.IV Puns with two communicated meanings 13

V. Visual Puns 15

VI. The Aim of Puns in Print Advertisements 16

VII. Advantages and Disadvantages of Puns in Print Advertisements 17

VIII. Conclusion 19

IX. Sources 20

I. Introduction

Even though television has become the predominant medium in which advertisements are delivered, printed advertisements still play a fundamental role in the world of commercial marketing. Billboards, magazines, newspapers and flyers are all mediums advertisers use in their attempt to reach as many potential customers as possible in order to sell their products.

Whether in public or at home, inhabitants of western societies are confronted with advertisements on a daily basis. The excessive supply and omnipresence of advertisements has lead many to ignore advertising strategies in general. This in turn forces advertisers to come up with ever new and creative strategies to catch and hold the attention of the viewing audience.

One of these strategies is the use of puns. Tanaka claims, that „punning is one way in which the advertiser attempts to improve social relations with his audience“ (Tanaka 1994:59) and Crompton’s theory states that the most important strategy in advertising is to „make ‛em laugh“ (Crompton 1987:39). Yet these strategies in advertising have not always been considered as being an acceptable practice when it comes to advertising products.

Prior to the 1960’s (Tanaka 1994:60) humour in advertising was looked down upon and a quotation by an ex-advertiser may reflect this view: “Frivolity has no place in advertising. Nor has humour. Spending money is usually serious business. [ .] People do not buy from clowns“ (Redfern 1984:130). This quote goes along with Pope who is cited as saying: “He that would pun would pick a pocket.“ From these two quotes, one can see that humour has not always had a place in advertising as we know it today and that puns in particular do not enjoy a high status in humour.

But advertising is a matter of going with trends. What’s in today, may be out tomorrow. Today, humour has a firm place in the world of advertising and puns have an essential part therein.

This term paper will concentrate on the use and funtion of puns in printed advertisements and

aims at answering the following questions: How do advertisers use puns and what makes a pun an effective means of advertising a specific product? What are the constituents of a good pun and why are puns not universally deployable? What are the advantages and disadvantages of puns in printed advertisements?

In order to answer these questions, this term paper is split up into six main parts. After introducing the relevant terminology for the topic at hand, the use of puns in advertisements will be explained via the Relevance Theory. This theory will provide the framework needed to explain the role puns have in printed advertisements and the effects they have on the viewing audience.

Furthermore, the Relevance Theory is needed to resolve the phenomena of ambiguity and vagueness, which are the fundaments of most puns used in advertisements; this will be done within the same chapter.

In the following, the four categories of puns according to Tanaka will be stated, defined and elaborated on by means of two examples for each category from current advertisements.

In succession to this, a short view to the world of visual puns will be taken. Again, this specific category of puns in printed advertisements will be explained and discussed with the help of examples fro.....[read full text]

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In this particular case, homonymy is much like polysemy, only that the multiple meanings which the word itself occupies do not necessarily have anything in common with each other. This may be exemplified with words such as bat or fluke. In the first example, bat may referr to the flying mammal. Yet bat may also referr to a cylindrical club used in baseball.

A fluke, as stated in the second example, may carry up to four different meanings, depending on the context it is used in. Thus, fluke may referr to a certain type of fish, the fins on a whales tail, the end parts of an anchor or to a stroke of luck.

What is described within this chapter is the written conversion of these linguistic phenomena. Yet a pun is more than just a supplementation of words. A pun is a form of deautomatisation of language and triggers a number of different associations with only one used term. How this is achieved is described in more detail in the following chapter.

III. Ambiguity, Vagueness and the Theory of Relevance

As described in the predeceding chapter, the recepient has to do more than merely recognize the linguistic meaning of a message. In order for communication to function properly, the language in use should be “the clean transmission of a pre-existing, self-sufficient, unequivocal meaning“ (Attridge 1988:140-141).

In other words, the recipient receives information, which he then decodes by associating it with something he already knows. If every aspect of communication would be like this, it would imply that every word sent would have only one thing the recipient could associate it with. In reality, however, ambiguity and vagueness play a major role in communication.

Ambiguity means that one can see two or more definite meanings in an utterance (Hermerén 1999:67). Ambiguity is made up of two different constituents: lexical ambiguity involves homophony, polysemy and homonymy, as defined in the predeceding chapter. Structural ambiguity refers to a word cluster which bears more than one syntactic interpretation (Ardizzone 1992: 11-12).

Vagueness means that a term or combination of words cannot be attributed with a specific meaning or definition. An example of vagueness is the term heap; how many grains of sand would need to be accumulated to make a heap? Two or three grains together are not a heap, yet one thousand grains together surely are.

How many grains of sand then, are needed to make a heap? The answer is not definable and the term remains vague. In advertising, words such as quality, excellence and style are considered to be vague because none of these have a standard by which they can be measured.

In light of the definitions of ambiguity and vagueness, one can see that not every term bears only one single meaning and not every term defines the meaning that goes along with it clearly. But that does not mean that communication can not take place where ambiguity and vagueness are at hand. Advertisers are aware of the fact that puns can enforce the meaning of a message by delivering two messages wrapped up in one phrase.

Or, as Attridge puts it: “In place of a context designed to suppress latent ambiguity, the pun is the product of a context deliberately constructed to enforce an ambiguity [ .]“(Attridge 1988:141, author’s italics). In other words, a pun uses ambiguity to deliberately imply more than one meaning. Tanaka (1994:61) adds that communication can succeed in the case of puns as long as the recipient is still able to resolve the message originally intended by the sender.

He even goes on to say that „the conscious recognition of multiple interpretations is essential for an audience to process an utterance as a pun“, (Tanaka 1994:62) making ambiguity and vagueness a part of a pun with whi.....

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The following example, taken from the February 2004 issue of Cosmopolitan, will serve as an example to illustrate the use and function of puns in advertising.

The reader is confronted with a headline which reads:“Every night you see a dirty film & don’t even know it.“ Once read, this headline immediately triggers two interpretations.
The first one of these should be the one catching the reader’s eye with the phrase “dirty film“ where the interpretation from the recipients point of view may sound something like: „Every night I watch a pornographic movie and I’m not even aware of it“.

Due to the probability that this is not the case, the reader is likely to reject this first interpretation and go on to search for a new one which will make more sense. To recover the speaker‛s (writer‛s) intended meaning, the given sentence needs to be put into context. Skimming over the ad, the reader will come across a picture of the product advertised for, in this case Olay facial cloths, and find a body copy which describes the product in more detail and therewith helps to clarify the meaning of the given headline.

The body copy reads:


Introducing Olay Daily Facials Express with lift & lock texture. The leading liquid cleanser and beauty bar can leave an invisible film of dirt and makeup. But this remarkable wet cloth with an ingenious lift & lock texture cleans what the leading liquid and bar can’t. You’ve never seen a clean this exciting before. Naturally, you’ll blush.“


Given the information that these facial pillows are supposed to remove make-up very thorougly, even beyond what can be perceived by the human eye, the recipient now knows, that the homonym “film“ does not have the meaning most commonly associated with “dirty“ but in this case means „layer“ and thus the orignially intended message becomes clear and may be read as:“Every night you have a layer of dirt on your face but you are not aware of it because you can’t see it.“ In combination with the body copy, the advertisement is completed and makes sense as a whole.

The recipient should come to the conclusion that this product will clean better than others and should thus be persuaded to buy it.

Therewith, the process of recovering a pun can be seen clearly: (1) the recipient is confronted with a message which triggers multiple interpretations and at first sight may not make sense. (2) The message is rejected and the recipient goes on to find another meaning. (3) With the addition of context the originally intended message is recovered and communication can be looked upon as having been successful.

Although all puns function in more or less the same way as described above, not all puns follow the same pattern. In his book “Advertising Language: A Pragmatic Approach to Advertisements in Britain and Japan”, Tanaka has placed puns into four different categories which help to analyse puns in advertising and will be explained .....

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The picture on the previous page serves as a typical example of a nonsensical pun. The real-estate agency Wisconsin New Homes simply states:“Another way to enjoy Minnesota is to move to Wisconsin.“ Most americans are aware of the fact that both Minnesota and Wisconsin are separate states of the United States.

Thus, the utterance does not make sense, as one cannot enjoy one state while living in another. The message is then immediately followed by the internet-address of the real-estate agency, which, at the same time gives the context which makes the intention of the first sentence clear. In this case Wisconsin provides the basis of the pun, as it is both the name of an American state as well as the name of the agency advertising for their services.

Thus, the viewer is first confronted with a nonsensical utterance and by the added context of the company’s name should come to the conclusion that the agency with the name Wisconsin may provide the services he needs in order to enjoy the state of Minnesota. The pun is achieved by simply assigning two separate meanings to one word.

Another example of this type of pun can be taken from the advertisement for the board game scrabble. In this case, the slogan reads:“Where else would you win praise for vomiting“.

The advertisement aims at simply stating something unusual to catch the viewer’s attention. Once caught, the recipient is faced with a pun which he has to recover. Just like the predeceding example, the pun is kept simple in form and structure. As it does not make sense to receive praise for vomiting, this first message should be rejected and a second meaning should be searched for.

The answer lies in the form in which the words are presented to the viewer. The words are written on the wooden chips included in this very well known board game. The viewer is now able to recover the intended meaning by the advertiser as he knows that it is not vomiting for which he may receive praise, but for simply spelling the word out while playing the game of scrabble.

In both cases, there are two sets of interpretations which are triggered by the inital, nonsensical utterance and in both cases, there is only one interpretation which the advertiser wants to communicate to his potential customer. The problem with nonsensical puns is their simplicity. From the point of view of the Relevance Theory, the utterances made in this type of pun usually receives less attention because processing effort needed to resolve the pun and retrieve the initial meaning is a small one.

To make the processing effort a higher one and to raise the memorizing effect of an advertisement based on a pun, advertisers often rely on nonsensical puns with a small „additive“. This type of pun has the same basis as the nonsensical pun, yet the initial and rejected meaning adds to the message as a whole. These puns, known as contextual puns, will be discussed .....

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The contents thereof are:


16 – 25? Feel like splashing out on whatever takes your fancy? Then get a Young Persons Railcard for only £20. You’ll save 1/3 on most rail fares throughout Britain and it lasts a whole year. Get your Railcard now – grab a leaflet at any staffed train station or call 08457484950 for the telesales number of your nearest Train Company.“


Like in simple, nonsensical puns, the reader rejects what he first sees and searches for another meaning. In this case, this meaning can only be retrieved by reading the entire text of the advertisement. As the reader at first does not know what to do with the headline and the slogan beneath it, he will then have to read the rest where a link between these two utterances is made.

In this particular example, National Rail obviously set out to attract the attention of women by connecting their product (which is not necessarily women-specific) with something women can (often) relate to – shoes. The connection between the two is far fetched, yet the context given in the body copy connects these two: save money by buying railcards and use the money you save to buy shoes.

The second example of contextual puns comes from Radian Gym, a fitness studio from the united states. The silhoutte of an obviously obese man, who is looking down on himself is shown and the slogan reads:“Obesity finds it hardest to catch up with those who are running.“

The viewer, hopefully an obese person and potential customer, is confronted with an utterance which does not make sense and may ask himself how it is possible for obesity to run. Once again, the inital meaning is rejected and another one needs to be searched for. The second meaning, which may sound like:“If I start running regularly, I might be able to do something against my obesity“, can be retrieved by the picture that goes along with the slogan which should add the notion of „obesity can’t run, but I can“ in .....

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On its own, the picture would be a rather vulgar cartoon of a woman which would be easy to involve in sexual activity. „Filling up empty spaces“ is obviously the reflection thereof. Yet the advertiser is able to get away with an utterance such as this one as the product he is selling has to do with „filling up empty spaces“, that is to say, it is sealants which are being sold in this case.

One may interpret the cartoon in such a way that the women depicted is able to apply the sealant and would thus be a kind of company mascot. Yet the viewer knows the intention of the advertiser. It is nothing more than a sexual association to his product.

Whereas puns often work by adding context to a headline, which then helps to recover the initial meaning of the advertiser, puns with sexual innuendo may be viewed upon as the inversion thereof. The initial meaning is of a sexual kind which helps to link the product to something positive in the viewer’s eye.

The information given afterwards does not play the main role in this type of advertising. Some advertisers aim at a kind of shock-effect which is then linked to their name just to make aware of their company’s name.

But not all puns containing sexual innuendo have to be crude in nature. Some advertisers, such as the one in the following example, only suggest sexual content without saying it straight away.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) regularly advertises with half-naked people to make people aware of their cause. In this particular example, a woman covered only by green leaves is backgrounded by the slogan:“Turn over a new leaf – try vegetarian.“ The expression „to turn over a new leaf“ means to try something new in life or to go on to a new stage in life.

The meaning first recovered when seeing a slogan of this type associated with PETA would then sound something like:“Change something important in your life – eat vegetarian.“ However, when seeing the slogan with the picture of a woman clothed only in leaves, it would suggest seeing the woman naked when the leaves clothing her would be turned over. Yet the principle behind this type of pun remains the same as the one in the first example.

The advertiser tries to associate his product .....

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