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This paper aims to investigate the experience of darkness on people’s evaluation of humorous taboo-themed ads and their willingness to share these ads digitally with others.

Multiple studies are conducted to demonstrate the connection between darkness and humor. Another experiment was conducted to investigate people’s willingness to share taboo-themed ads.

The results demonstrate that people in dark settings (vs light) found controversial, taboo-themed ads to be more humorous. Three studies demonstrate that people in the dark (vs light) condition found taboo-themed ads to be more humorous. More importantly, despite finding taboo-themed ads to be more humorous, people in dark settings (vs light) were less inclined to share these ads on social media platforms.

When using humorous taboo-themed ads, advertisers are encouraged to show these ads in dark settings. If the physical environment is uncontrollable, marketers may still benefit by cueing consumers about darkness (e.g. through their products) or reminding them of nightly activities which may also yield similar effects. However, the cautionary tale is that, although people in the dark may enjoy these ads, they may not be willing to share it with others.

Marketers utilize taboo-themed ads to increase consumer interest. Despite its controversial content, darkness enhances people’s evaluation toward these taboo-themed ads. However, if one of the goals of advertisers is to create an ad that is amenable to sharing, developing a humorous taboo-themed ad may not be the most rewarding strategy.

This study examines the use of dark humor in brand-to-brand communications on social media and its impact on consumers' brand perceptions. In particular, this study looks at roasting messages in which a brand humorously insults its peers.

The authors used a sampling method to recruit 286 participants from the United States. They employed an ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc analysis to test the hypotheses, as well as Hayes' PROCESS to test the mediation and moderation effects, including Johnson–Neyman procedure.

The authors found that not all customers find roasting messages funny. Rather, consumers' personality and age will influence their perceived humor of the messages and their brand evaluations. Customers who are young and extroverted are likely to believe roasting messages to be funny. They thus perceive the brand to be cooler and more sincere when using such a communication approach, compared to when the brand neutrally interacts with others. Meanwhile, brands may find less success with old and introverted customers.

This research sheds light on how the consumers' perception of humor in a roasting type of brand-to-brand communication has an impact on consumers' psychological perceptions of brand coolness and brand sincerity. To guide practitioners, it explored how the interaction between a consumer's personality and age moderates the aforementioned relationship.

This study aims to extend the use of psychology in the field of tourism crisis and disaster management using coping theory. It examines how resident emotions change in the extended prodromal stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and how residents used humour to cope with stress from not being able to travel.

Early COVID-19 (March–April 2020) was characterised by negative media reports, lockdowns and travel restrictions but for Indonesia, no direct effects in terms of loss of life. This unusual context has led to phenomena not previously studied – humour as a coping strategy. This research consists of two studies: Study 1 used thematic analysis of interviews before and during the early lockdown period with a panel of 245 quarantined residents who had travelled in the prior two years. Study 2 followed up using a #hasthtag analysis of travel-related videos content posted on Instagram and TikTok.

The COVID-19 global pandemic is an unusual crisis which has resulted in high levels of stress and uncertainty. This study identified the unusual characteristics of the COVID-19 crises and changes of quarantined resident’s emotions during the pre-event and prodromal stages. In addition, this study found the use of humour as a coping mechanism during the lockdown period and the use of social media as the vehicle for humour.

These findings may be generalisable only to a crises and disasters with an extended prodromal stage. Interestingly, climate change has some similar characteristics where warning signs are available, but the personal implications have not yet become apparent.

The emotions associated with crisis are dynamic and crisis managers may tailor communication to help deal with stress.

This research provides an insight into how humorous content can be used to reduce negative emotions in the early stage of a stressful event associated with travel restrictions. This study may be suitable for use in integrated marketing communication in post-recovery messaging for the tourism industry and destination management organisation in the digital platform.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate “dark humour” during the early stages of COVID-19 and also the use of coping strategies to explain how humour can reduce stress.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to develop a resource-based model depicting a decreased level of psychological resourcefulness – relational energy, as a novel explanatory mechanism that accounts for the harm of abusive supervision, and we further investigate the role of leader humor as a boundary condition.

We applied multilevel path analysis to test our hypotheses with three-time-point survey data collected from 226 supervisor-employee dyads in a telecommunication company in China across six months.

Our results show that abusive supervision is negatively related to employee relational energy, leading to a subsequent decline in employee job performance. The predictions of the depleting effects get alleviated by leader humor.

This study foregrounds the importance of employee relationship management in the workplace and reveals that some abusive supervisors may manage to sustain employee performance and relational energy by using humor in their interactions, which necessitates immediate intervention.

These findings offer novel insights into the deleterious impact of abusive supervision by demonstrating the critical role of relational energy in dyadic interactions. We also reveal the potential dark side of leader humor in the context of abuse in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of humour within two different organisations, policing and ambulance work, which are linked by their focus on emergency work.

Semi structured interviews with 45 police officers and ambulance staff sought to understand more about the relationships between these two distinctly different professions who work together closely and regularly in often very difficult situations.

Interviews with police officers and ambulance staff revealed that humour is a key component in the working relationship of police officers and ambulance staff. The humour of superiority and the humour of exclusion are used to both cope with the demands of their work, reinforce group values and to strengthen the shared bonds between the two occupations.

Humour has been studied within organisations but this paper reveals that humour also functions across occupational divides. Police officers and ambulance staff draw from a mutually acceptable but culturally defined joke‐book in the course of their work. The informal forces of humour appear, ironically, to provide a means of enhanced interoperability between the two organisations but at the expense of other agencies involved within the emergency service field.

The purpose of this research is to examine ritualistic humor or joking that exists in a small, rural police department in Western New York.

Data were collected through participatory observations and interviews during the summer of 2014. Both authors worked in tandem to capitalize on individual expertise to maximize data collection and analyses.

Results suggest that humor is leveraged by officers to socialize, cope and demarcate authority. Depending on the circumstance, humor can be orchestrated or spontaneous, given the intentions of the officer.

Humor is an important lens through which to view police behavior. The current research underscores the importance of levity as a gauge of organizational and individual health.