Irony and sarcasm in advertisements: Effects of relevant inappropriateness § Luuk Lagerwerf * VU University Amsterdam, Communication Science, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands Received 18 May 2004; received in revised form 31 January 2007; accepted 4 May 2007 Abstract The effects on audiences of irony in advertisements and of sarcasm in public information announcements were investigated in two studies. In advertisements for commercial products and services, irony was found in the use of negative captions where positive captions were expected. Sarcasm was used by placing a positive caption against a background displaying a harrowing picture. Such departures from common practice in the use of negative and positive wordings were regarded as inappropriate. It turned out that advertisements with ironic intent were appreciated more when the inappropriateness was re-interpreted correctly as irony (Study 1). Even so, irony and sarcasm may impede a proper understanding of the advertisements’ informative intention. This has a negative impact on the assessment by an audience of the importance of the societal issues emphasized in sarcastic announcements (Study 2). # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Irony; Sarcasm; Negation; Multimodality; Advertisements; Public service announcements; Relevance; Neo-Gricean 1. Introduction The appreciation of an advertisement on the part of consumers should enhance their willingness to buy a product or service (Van Raaij, 1993). Recently, one has seen a steady increase in the use of incongruent elements in advertisements. This tendency is due to the advertisers’ expectation that such incongruent elements will have a positive effect on consumers’ www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 1702–1721 § Earlier drafts of this manuscript were presented in Dutch at the VIOT congress, December, 2002, Antwerp, Belgium (a printed version was published in the conference proceedings in December, 2003). An English version was presented at the 2nd International Conference on Advertising (June 2003, Amsterdam, Netherlands). * Tel.: +31 20 598 6915; fax: +31 20 598 6820. E-mail address: l.lagerwerf@fsw.vu.nl. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.05.002