Snapchat has published a new study designed to help brands understand what younger audiences actually find funny.
Not “corporate funny.” Not a recycled meme posted three weeks late with a product awkwardly placed in the corner. The report digs into the strange, fast-moving and heavily contextual humor used by Gen Z and Gen Alpha across social platforms, private chats and real-life conversations.
Snapchat worked with Omnicom Advertising to survey more than 6,000 social media users between the ages of 13 and 28 in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany and India. The goal was to study how younger users interpret jokes, share them and decide when a brand has earned the right to participate.
Humor Is Becoming a Social Language
For younger users, humor is not sitting in a separate entertainment box. It is mixed into almost everything.
People use jokes to test friendships, show that they understand a reference, soften difficult conversations and signal that they belong to a particular online community. Sometimes the joke is funny because of the actual content. Sometimes it is funny because of who sent it. Sometimes explaining it destroys the entire thing.
Snapchat’s research found that 67% of respondents choose friends partly based on their sense of humor. Another 57% said the identity of the person who understands a joke matters more than the number of people who like it.
That detail should catch the attention of marketers. Brands tend to measure humor through public engagement: views, likes, reactions and comments. Younger users may be placing more value on whether something feels personal enough to send to one specific friend.
A joke with 300 likes could matter more than one with 300,000 if it keeps moving through private conversations.
Young Audiences Want Funny Brands—Until Brands Try Too Hard
There is clearly an opening for brands to use more humor. There is also a fairly large trap sitting directly in front of that opening.
According to Snapchat, three in four young people feel that brands often come across like older people trying to joke with them.
Most social media users have seen this happen. A company notices a phrase or meme becoming popular. Someone adds it to the content calendar. The post goes through several rounds of approval. By the time it appears, the joke is already tired—and the caption sounds as though it was written by a committee attempting to impersonate a teenager.
The issue is not always the joke itself. It is the lack of context.
Nearly nine in 10 respondents said some jokes only make sense when the audience understands the original reference. Meanwhile, 79% agreed that explaining a joke ruins it.
Brands cannot simply borrow the visible part of an online joke. They need to understand the community, timing and unspoken logic underneath it.
Random Humor Is Rarely Completely Random
A lot of modern internet humor looks chaotic from the outside. Odd images. Deliberately bad editing. Captions that appear unrelated to the video. Sudden shifts between sincerity and irony.
There is usually more structure involved than brands assume.
Snapchat found that “completely random” humor was the style younger respondents liked most. Yet 92% also agreed that the best jokes may appear random while still following an internal logic.
That is where trend-chasing campaigns often break down. A marketer copies the surface-level weirdness without understanding why the original worked. The result is random, but not funny.
Younger audiences also appear comfortable holding several tones at once. The study reported that 91% believe something can be serious and funny at the same time. A post can mock a situation while still showing genuine affection for it. It can be detached and emotionally invested in the same breath.
Traditional brand guidelines are not always built for that kind of ambiguity.
Timing Can Make a Brand Part of the Joke—or Become the Joke
Snapchat describes a “Goldilocks Moment” when brands have the best chance of joining an emerging joke.
Join too early and the brand may misunderstand what the community is building. Join at the right point and it can contribute something original while the joke is still growing. Join too late and the post becomes another sign that the marketing team has only just discovered something everyone else has moved past.
The study found that 91% of respondents believe the same joke can feel funny in one setting and awkward in another.
That makes timing more complicated than watching a trending-topics dashboard. Brands need people who are already familiar with the communities they want to reach. They also need approval systems that can move quickly without squeezing every bit of personality out of the idea.
A six-day approval process is not ideal when the joke has a four-day lifespan.
Snapchat Sees an Opportunity in Private Sharing
Snapchat is naturally positioning itself as a useful platform for this kind of marketing.
The company says jokes on Snapchat are almost six times more likely to be shared than discovered, suggesting that users often encounter humorous content somewhere else and bring it into conversations with friends and family on the platform.
Snapchat also reported that half of its users create funny content through augmented reality tools, while 82% enjoy seeing brands collaborate with their favorite comedy creators.
That gives advertisers several options beyond posting a supposedly witty caption. A brand could work with creators who already understand a specific audience, develop an AR Lens people can modify or create something that becomes funnier as users add their own version.
The strongest idea may not be a finished joke. It may be a format that gives users enough room to continue it.
Can Snapchat Really Teach a Brand to Be Funny?
Probably not in the strictest sense.
Humor relies on timing, instinct, self-awareness and knowing when to leave something alone. A research report can describe those elements. It cannot install them inside a marketing department.
Still, Snapchat’s findings offer a useful warning for brands trying to connect with younger users. Being current is not the same as being culturally fluent. Using slang is not the same as understanding it. Posting a meme does not automatically make a company feel relatable.
The brands that succeed with humor may not be the ones producing the most jokes. They may simply be the ones that listen longer, react faster and know when they have nothing useful to add.
Sometimes the funniest brand decision is not posting.
