Death walks into a bar: Humor and profanity in advance care planning messages

Abstract

Although scholars note advantages and disadvantages to using humor and profanity, influential leaders in the Death Positive Movement (DPM) use both message features to motivate end-of-life (EOL) advance care planning (ACP). Through the lens of expectancy violations theory (EVT), this study examined relationships between perceived humor, profanity in messages, trait profanity use in receivers, perceived offensiveness, perceived speaker effectiveness, and perceived message effectiveness. Participants (N = 604) were randomly exposed to a podcast about ACP containing clean humor, profane humor, or no humor. Results indicated that profanity and perceived humor were positively related to offensiveness, and offensiveness was negatively related to perceived speaker and message effectiveness. When perceived as non-offensive, perceived humor was positively related to perceived speaker and message effectiveness. Surprisingly, profane messages offended profane receivers more than they offended less-profane receivers. These results suggest that to be maximally effective, ACP motivators should use humor cautiously and avoid profanity.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge Xiaoquan Zhao, Gary Kreps, Kevin Wright, Olivia Vessel, and Ben Patterson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These podcast clips are available from the first author upon request.

2 This study was part of a larger study in which pre-test measures and a control group were relevant. In the present study, which details findings about responses to a podcast clip, the control group is irrelevant. With the control group, n = 695 (410 men, 280 women, 5 other).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.