BLACK HUMOUR IN POLITICAL ADVERTISING. CULTURAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTRIBUTES

The study provides some findings about black humour in political ads and its main goal, and that is either influencing the voters' emotions when it comes to unpleasant, sometimes absurd and awful things, or drawing the electorate attention to the sensation message. While choosing the black humour strategy for political ads, it is crucial to consider ethno-cultural, demographic, and socio-political specifics of the target region for a politician. Current social trends and situational factors should be counted too. The empirical pilot study results show peculiarities in perceiving black humour as part of political advertising by university students 18 to 23 years old born and living in Ukraine. The respondents were given a task to choose one political advertising message out of total four: 1) an absurd (‘awful') solution of a public problem is presented as black humour; 2) an absurd (‘awful') solution is presented in standard way, not a hint for a black humour; 3) a conventional solution of a public problem is presented without black humour; and 4) an absurd (‘awful') solution is presented with a black humour but it is refuted or is considered non-optimal. It has been revealed that respondents prefer serious messages where both absurd and conventional political decisions are formulated directly and literally. Based on the Kettell's questionnaire, the personal devotion factors towards black humour in political advertising have been highlighted, and these are sensitivity (scale I) and anxiety (scale B). The questionnaire resulted in outcomes demonstrating that respondents who chose both humorous and serious political slogans had higher sensitivity rates. Those who often chose directly formulated absurd (‘terrible') decisions had higher anxiety rates. The study also provides the following findings: in comparison to men women oftener choose humorous slogans, whereas men are more likely to prefer expressed directly slogans without humorous and absurd (‘awful') decision. The empirical research results can be for sure used to create targeted political advertising for Ukrainian students 18 to 23 y.o.