Why Brand Humour Falls Flat With Gen Z.

Snapchat published research on 5 August 2026 into how people aged 13 to 28 actually use humour, and the headline number is uncomfortable reading for anyone who signs off social copy.

Three in four young people say brands often feel like “older people trying to joke with them”.

The instinct is to blame the writing. Hire someone younger, rewrite the tone of voice document, let more memes through.

That instinct misreads the research. The most operational finding in it is not about what is funny, it is about when. Jokes have a window, and most brands are structurally incapable of shipping inside it.

What the research actually says

Snap commissioned the study with Omnicom Advertising and surveyed more than 6,000 social media users aged 13 to 28 across the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and India. It was published as “How to Laugh (and Win) with the Next Generation”.

Note the age band. At 13 to 28 this is wider than Gen Z alone, so it is not a teenage sample being generalised.

Its framing is that humour is not entertainment for this group, it is a social language. 67% say they choose friends based on sense of humour. 57% say who understands a joke matters more than how many people like it.

So a joke that lands badly is not a failed post. It is a failed attempt to speak the language.

Worth saying plainly: this is Snapchat’s own business research. The mechanics below rest on a six market sample and stand up on their own. The findings about Snapchat’s particular strengths are the part with a house interest attached, so weight them accordingly.

The mechanics are more learnable than people assume

The study sets out four rules, and each one carries a number behind it.

• Context is the punchline. 89% say you need to get the reference for some jokes to make sense, and 79% agree that explaining a joke ruins it.
• Random has rules. 92% agree the best jokes seem random but actually have logic behind them.
• Irony is the base layer. 91% believe things can be funny and serious at the same time.
• Jokes have to grow. 88% say humour gets funnier the more it builds or continues.

None of that is mysterious. A competent content team can absorb it in an afternoon and brief against it the same week.

Every joke has a window, and it closes

The part that gets skimmed is the lifecycle. The research splits a joke’s life into three stages and names the middle one the Goldilocks moment.

Too early, and the community is still building the language, so a brand is better off watching than posting. Too late, and the reference has been explained by the mainstream press and copied by other brands, at which point joining marks you out as the last to know.

The middle stage is when a joke is spreading and being remixed and there is still room to add a layer to it rather than borrow one. 91% agree the same joke can feel funny in one place and awkward in another.

That is a timing and placement problem. Timing is a property of your operation, not your copywriter, which is the same reason set-and-forget publishing stopped working.

Your approval chain sets your comedy ceiling

Take the window seriously and the arithmetic gets blunt.

Say a reference is genuinely live for a week. If the route from idea to published post runs writer, social lead, brand manager, legal, then a sign-off meeting that happens on Thursdays, you cannot arrive inside the window. You will arrive at “too late” every time, by design.

That is not a creative failure. It is a queue with more stages in it than the joke has days.

Which is why “we need funnier content” is the wrong brief. The funniest idea in the building still leaves the building through the same pipe as everything else.

Signs the process is the problem, not the joke

• Your best reactive ideas do get posted, about a week after the group chat had them.
• Nobody can name who is allowed to approve a joke without escalating it.
• A reactive post goes through the same approval route as a product announcement.
• The team self-censors at drafting stage because “that will never get through”.
• Post reviews interrogate the caption, and nobody logs how many days it sat in review.

If two or more of those are true, you have a workflow problem wearing a creative costume.

What good looks like

A team that can land inside the window has usually done four unglamorous things.

1. Pre-approved formats. A small set of reactive formats already cleared by brand and legal, so the only live decision is whether this specific reference fits one of them.
2. One named decider. A single person with standing authority to approve a reactive post, working to a clock measured in hours.
3. A written no list. The topics, tones and references the brand will not touch, agreed in advance, so moving fast does not mean carrying more risk.
4. A kill rule. If it has not shipped by the deadline, it does not ship at all. Late humour is worse than no humour.

The research also found 82% enjoy brands collaborating with their favourite funny creators. A working relationship with a creator who is already fluent in a reference buys speed you cannot manufacture internally, as long as they speak in their own voice instead of reading your copy back to you.

What we would not do

Speed is not the whole answer, and the study is clear that a brand joining a trend changes the trend.

So do not turn the calendar reactive. A brand that chases every reference has no positioning, only reflexes. The majority of the plan should still be the work you own.

Do not force it either. “Too early” is a named failure mode in the research, and a brand posting into a joke the community is still writing reads worse than staying quiet.

And do not read any of this as a case for buying your way into culture. The outcome Snapchat measured was sharing: humour on the platform is nearly six times more likely to be shared than discovered. Sharing is something people choose to do, and no amount of spend produces it.

How NBK thinks about brand humour

Most content problems present as taste problems and resolve as operations problems. Humour is the clearest case, because it arrives with a deadline attached to it.

A brand cannot decide to be funny. It can decide that a reactive idea gets a named approver, a two hour clock and a pre-cleared format, and then find out whether it is funny.

The obvious objection is that you cannot teach a company to have a sense of humour, and that is fair. It just assumes the constraint is talent. In most teams NBK looks at, the funny ideas already exist and expire in a review queue.

Next step

Before the next brief asks for funnier content, time your own pipeline. Take the last five reactive posts, measure the hours from idea to live, and set that against how long the reference actually stayed alive.

If the gap is the problem, the fix is a shorter route rather than a different writer. NBK’s free social media approval process template is a sensible place to start rebuilding it.

If your social process is slowing down good ideas, NBK can help rebuild the workflow behind the content.