Humor and advertising in Twitter: An approach from the General Theory of Verbal Humor and Metapragmatics

Irony and verbal humor play a leading role in computer-mediated discourses. Irony, for instance, is mainly used to criticise politics and politicians in Twitter, while verbal humor contributes to strengthen social relations in Twitter or Facebook. In this paper, we focus on humor in order to explore more in deep its mechanisms, function, and effects within Twitter “conversations” between Spanish companies or public institutions and microblog users. Assuming the main premises of the General Theory of Verbal Humor and adopting a metapragmatic approach, this research aims at identifying the knowledge resources at work when humor is used as an advertising strategy; as well as categorizing these tweets according to the types of logical mechanisms adopted by the interactants to solve the script-opposition in which humor is based. The analysis proves that verbal and visual humor is a strategy adopted by most companies and institutions in order to give visibility to their products and services and to reinforce the social ties with their potential customers.