AGGRESSIVE HUMOR AS A MARKETING STRATEGY. A CASE STUDY OF RYANAIR’S ACTIVITY ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

Humor has been used in the last decades not only in conversations between friends, families or colleagues, but also in the news to attract more viewers (Soare, 2023), in marketing strategies to get more clients (Bilecen, Canarslan, 2023) and as a method to cope with different moments in one’s life such as pandemics, conflicts and wars. This paper analyzes how aggressive humor is being used by the communication team of Ryanair, on social media, to make the airline more popular and, potentially, get more clients and respond to possible criticism. The study includes comments and memes made by the company on TikTok and Instagram and analyzes how the words trigger humor, the context and the target, as in the SSTH and GTVH theories postulated by Attardo and Raskin (1991).