Introduction
Humor is a widely used communicative strategy in advertising, often employed to
attract attention, enhance memorability, and create positive associations with brands.
From a linguistic perspective, humorous discourse typically relies on mechanisms such
as incongruity, irony, wordplay, and intertextual references, which invite audiences to
infer meaning beyond what is explicitly stated. In contemporary digital environments,
these mechanisms are increasingly shaped by internet culture, where memes, visual-
verbal hybridity, and platform-specific conventions play a central role in
communication.
Social media platforms, and Instagram in particular, have become important sites for
humorous brand communication. Instagram advertising is characterized by brevity,
visual dominance, and competition for user attention, which encourages brands to
adopt formats that resemble memes, jokes, or everyday digital expressions rather
than traditional advertisements. In this context, humor is rarely realized through
language alone. Instead, humorous meaning emerges from the interaction of verbal
and visual elements, including typography, layout, color, imagery, and product
placement. This makes Instagram advertising especially suitable for multimodal
discourse analysis, which examines how different semiotic modes work together to
construct meaning.
Snickers, a globally established chocolate brand, offers a particularly illustrative case
of humorous Instagram advertising. Building on its long-standing slogan “You’re not
you when you’re hungry,” Snickers’ Instagram posts frequently depict everyday social,
professional, and cultural situations in which hunger is presented as the cause of
irrational or awkward behavior. These posts often resemble internet memes in both
structure and logic, combining short textual statements with bold typography,
minimalistic layouts, and consistent brand colors. As such, Snickers’ Instagram
presence provides a rich dataset for examining how linguistic humor and visual design
interact to construct humor and brand identity in a digital context.
While previous research has extensively addressed humor in advertising and branding,
as well as multimodal meaning-making in visual media, fewer studies have focused on
detailed linguistic analyses of humorous brand communication on Instagram. Existing
work on digital humor and memes has emphasized the importance of visual-verbal
interaction, yet branded content is often treated only marginally. Consequently, there
remains a research gap concerning how commercial actors systematically employ
linguistic and visual resources to adapt humor and meme logic for branding purposes
on social media platforms.
The main aim of this thesis is to examine how humor is constructed through the
interaction of linguistic and visual resources in Snickers’ Instagram advertising and
how these multimodal humor strategies contribute to the brand’s digital identity. The
study adopts a qualitative multimodal discourse-analytical approach and focuses on a
selection of humorous Instagram posts published between 2021 and 2025.
The analysis is guided by the following research questions:
1. What linguistic strategies, such as puns, irony, meme logic, and
intertextual references, are employed in Snickers’ humorous Instagram
posts?
2. How do visual elements, including layout, typography, color, and
imagery, interact with language to construct humorous meaning in
these posts?
3. How do these combined linguistic and visual strategies contribute to
the construction of a coherent brand identity in Snickers’ Instagram
advertising?
By addressing these questions, this thesis argues that humor in Snickers’ Instagram
advertising is not incidental but systematically produced through recurring linguistic
patterns and stable visual conventions. By foregrounding the interaction between
language and image, the study contributes to research on multimodal discourse
analysis, digital advertising, and the linguistic study of humor and meme-based
communication.