Humor at the Super Bowl: Big, Bold… and Bizarre?
Humor has always been a Super Bowl failsafe. Sometimes laughter’s a fashionable tactic, sometimes the industry claims to take ads more seriously – but there are always commercials which put fun first. Super Bowl LIX was no exception. The night was studded with ads aiming to make viewers laugh, with a 5-Star effort from WeatherTech at the top of the Test Your Ad pile.
But humor is a very broad category. Not every funny or silly ad performs well. The types of comedy audiences find amusing change over time. Cultural difference plays a role – British and American audiences don’t just spell humor differently, they laugh at different things.
So let’s take a look at the humor hits and misses of Super Bowl LIX and see what we can learn from them.
Broad, Big and Bold Humor Works Best
First up, let’s remember the context. The Super Bowl is the biggest audience on live TV. So your humor needs to be broad-based and widely appealing. Plus, that audience isn’t leaning in to catch every witty nuance of your ads. They’re yelling, eating, laughing at their own jokes and arguing over the game. So your humor probably has to be big, brash and obvious. Repeating a joke a few times is not a mistake here.
Keep those things in mind and it’s a lot easier to work out why some ads hit the funny bone well. WeatherTech is a great example. They aren’t the first brand to get a laugh out of senior citizens going wild and behaving badly, but it’s a device that usually does well. It’s very visual, obviously incongruous and therefore funny, and the brand can riff on it through the ad – WeatherTech ends up with the rampaging grannies getting mugshots. They put the ad over the top by a brilliant soundtrack – Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” cutting through and getting audience attention.
Reese’s 4-Star “Don’t Eat Lava” is another example of a brand getting the benefits of going big and bold. The ad has a really simple premise – Reese’s Lava Cups are so delicious people are wanting to eat real lava, so the ad’s a PSA telling them to not do that. It’s so simple you might think it sounds stupid on paper – but in execution “Don’t Eat Lava” is a winner. The ad starts straight-faced and gets wilder and wilder, with the poor presenter full-body-tackling lava-craving consumers and being dragged by a wild old lady on her scooter. It’s sheer physical comedy in America’s great slapstick tradition, and it works because the idea just gets funnier from repetition.
Not every successful funny ad this year went so wild, but even the more dialogue-driven ones, like Stella Artois’ “Other Dave” with David Beckham’s long-lost twin, are based on a really big, fun concept. Don’t be afraid of the obvious, is the major lesson this year.
Humor has its Limits
But there’s a difference between wild and weird. We saw a few ads which aimed for laughs but just went too over the top. The singer Seal as a seal? Heads in the shape of Cowboy Hats? Dancing tongues? Dead aliens? All surreal ideas which must have looked funny on paper but simply didn’t cross over well to a real, broad-based audience. Some of them managed to score well on short-term Spike and Brand Fluency, but so did the more successful humor ads. Buzz is no substitute for brand growth.
So be big, be bold, but don’t be too bizarre. How does that humor advice translate outside the Super Bowl context? In the UK, Christmas ads tend to use character comedy and clever jokes and references more than slapstick and wild ideas, because they’re designed for lasting positive impact across the whole holiday season. But for big live-TV events or campaign launches, there’s a role for the brasher humor style.
The bottom line, though, is that humor has always been a high-risk, high-reward strategy. The funniest campaigns are often the best, but some jokes just fall flat. That’s why testing is so vital for humor campaigns – you simply can’t be sure if an ad’s funny until you show it to people. And you don’t want to be the brand whose joke bombs in front of 120 million viewers.
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