Ad Fact: Guys Have All the Fun

Sit down, ladies, this may come as a shock. We’ll break it to you as gently as possible. It’s about your sense of humor. You don’t really have one.

This isn’t our judgment. It’s the considered opinion of the advertising industry, the $200-billion-a-year jackhammer that shapes consumer tastes, molds self-images and forges desire. Advertisers know what turns women on. And it isn’t a good laugh.

Peer closely at the nearest TV screen. The commercials on “guy” shows (anything involving a babe, a ball or bullets will do) are bawdy, rowdy and frequently hilarious. Think about those “SportsCenter” spots, or virtually anything selling a beer or a dot-com company. Guy stuff, all of it.

Ads can make fun of men, who are frequently portrayed as doofuses, losers, louses, weirdos, the butt of whatever joke God or Procter & Gamble wants to dish out. A&W; Root Beer has an entire campaign built around the slogan “It’s Good to Be Thick-Headed”: “I don’t remember getting that massage!” says one chump as he inspects a bill in front of his wife.

Now look at any soap opera, any estrogen-intensive “lifestyle” program like “Later Today” or just a few minutes of Lifetime, the “Television for Women” cable channel. Decades after the women’s movement began, you’ll still find lots of perky “housewives” with Valium-inducing anxieties about waxy buildup. You’ll find product pitches swaddled in earnestness, larded with treacle, poisoned by hard-sell solemnity.

Here’s part of what two hours of Lifetime commercials look like: Kraft Singles (“Two out of three kids don’t get enough calcium”); Tums (“Works fast with safe, healthy calcium”); Lens Express (former Wonder Woman Lynda Carter says, “I trust these baby blues to Lens Express”); Sears (washing machines on sale); Olive Garden restaurants (“When you’re here, you’re family”).

Let’s flip to the game. Please. Here, we find talking frogs and lizards, those great Budweiser “Whassup?!” spots.

If the products we buy reflect our passions and personalities, then humor has a Y (male)chromosome. Whether it’s our genetic wiring or a byproduct of upbringing is unclear. Either way, advertising executives say, using humor is all but verboten when it comes to women.

Nina DiSesa, one of the highest-ranking women in the ad business, offers a telling anecdote. A client of the agency she runs, McCann-Erickson in New York, tested three ad approaches last year for the same product (DiSesa won’t name names). The would-be ads were shown to panels of women. The campaigns ranged from the starkly serious to the flat-out funny, she says. “The funny campaign bombed. Women just didn’t want to watch it,” DiSesa says.

This appears to be true even when the product is consumed equally by men and women.

A few years ago, Fruit of the Loom ran commercials in which a line of men’s underwear moves along a clothesline. As the undies parade past, the soundtrack fills with a lusty rendition of a familiar children’s ditty: “Do your boys hang low?/ Do they wobble to and fro?/ Can you tie them in a knot/ Can you tie them in a bow?” The voice-over: “Hey, contain yourself. Double-layer fly for good, solid support.”

Another humorous campaign starring men dressed up as walking, talking fruit was used to target men but not women, says John Shivel, the company’s vice president of marketing services. Ads for its current women’s line are “more traditional,” stressing comfort, with the bland tagline: “Everybody loves Fruit.”

In the 1950s, an increasingly suburban nation learned about an array of new packaged conveniences through TV advertising, which took on a quasi-educational, brand-building role, says Catherine Coleman, curator of the American Advertising Museum in Portland, Ore.

Ads for Wisk and Tide, for example, concentrated on the whiter-than-white facts simply because many women were buying detergent for their first washing machines.

Despite adman David Ogilvy’s famous 1963 dictum (“The consumer isn’t a moron. She’s your wife.”), this changed little throughout the 1960s. The so-called creative revolution that produced that decade’s freshest and most esteemed advertising was primarily a revolution in the selling of “men’s” products: cars (Volkswagen, Avis), cigarettes (Benson & Hedges), deodorant (Right Guard), alcoholic beverages and antacids (Alka-Seltzer). The image of women remained stereotypical through the ‘60s, Coleman says.

This began to change as more women entered the work force and the number of female-headed households started rising in the early 1970s.

Few campaigns used humor to reach women, and those that did very often bombed, Coleman says. Ad people have theories about this.

* Humor often involves ridicule or slapstick, and many women don’t appreciate these aggressive forms of comedy, suggests Jerry Della Femina, the advertising veteran behind dozens of famous ads (Joe Isuzu, Blue Nun wines, Meow Mix cat food).

“Men like it when other men fall and hit their heads,” says Della Femina. “Women do not find pain to be funny.”

* Products purchased primarily by women aren’t inherently funny. Advertising executives point out that women are still the main buyers of household products--packaged foods, cleansers, medicines. There’s nothing particularly hilarious here, points out Don Pogany, the Chicago creative director who steered Budweiser’s “Whassup?!” campaign onto the air.

* Women love humor; it’s men who just don’t get it. Since men control the ad business, advertising reflects male agendas and misguided ideas about what women like and want.

“Men are just getting it wrong,” says Rich Silverstein, whose San Francisco agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, created the “Got Milk?” ads. “Advertisers talk down to women. They should lighten up.”

Occasionally, small shafts of light break through.

Nike ran an ad last year featuring the U.S. women’s soccer team. Its subtext was that women approach sports differently than men, that women esteem cooperation and teamwork above individual glory. Remarkably, it was funny. When one player has a dental appointment, the rest of the team goes with her.

Recently, Oxygen Network, a new cable channel designed for women, began promoting itself. In one commercial, a scuba diver zips up her wetsuit without a hitch while a male diver gets his rear zipper stuck. The kicker: “No back hair. Another great reason for being a woman.”

“Women thought it was hilarious, but so did men,” says Geraldine Laybourne, Oxygen’s founder and chief executive. “Part of our thesis is that women are funny, they do have a sense of humor, [but] they don’t want to be talked down to.”