Abstract: Humor is one of the most ordinary modes of advertising appeal. A review of the recent researches into the communication effects of humor appeals in advertising was summarized as follows: (a) Humor appeals had an advantage of attracting audience’s attention and increasing their degree of preference to the advertisements and the brands of certain products. However, a consistent conclusion had not been achieved as to whether humor appeals exerted promotion or inhibition to brand information processing. (b) The communication effects of humor appeals were obviously under the influences of products types and involvement, audience’s need for humor and cognition, gender, cultural differences and prior brand evaluation, the types of humor and other relevant factors. Furthermore, there remained some other problems. For example, environment influence research, systematic researches into communication process and theorization were still in need

Key words: advertising humor appeal, The Elaboration Likelihood Model, involvement, need for humor