The Roles of Appropriateness and Relevance in Determining Reactions to Humor in Frontline Service Encounters

In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore (1999) suggest that service firms can use humor to create a competitive edge. A humorous approach to provision has been discussed in services as disparate as restaurants and accounting (Williams 2009; Michaud 2000), and airline personnel have been explicitly encouraged to set up inflight gags (Woodyard 2004). Humor’s effects have been examined in advertising including that of services (Bauerly 1990; Fugate 1998; Fugate et al. 2000; McCullough and Taylor 1993), with little investigation in other consumer contexts. We explore how two humor aspects—relevance (the degree to which a joke by a service provider is germane to the consumption purpose) and appropriateness (the acceptability or desirability of humor in a particular context), and their interplay—map onto service delivery. Relevant advertising humor generally outperforms irrelevant (Weinberger and Gulas 1992), but we believe in service contexts relevance might be assessed at two levels with different degrees of cognitive processing (Lovelock 1983). With few resources devoted to joke processing, heuristics should provide evaluation shortcuts (Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly 1989; Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann 1983) and a joke may be considered relevant to a consumer’s purpose if it simply shares surface feature overlap with the service (e.g., a joke set in a restaurant setting delivered by a waiter). However, when consumers devote significant effort to joke processing, evaluation may occur at a deeper level (Chaiken et al. 1989; Petty et al. 1983). Here, relevance may be judged more sophisticatedly, according to diagnosticity of the joke’s deeper substance for current goals.