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Traditionally, humor studies have assumed that there are some necessary and sufficient conditions for humor: it may be incongruity, superiority or arousal-release. This assumption, based on a philosophical position called "essentialism", has lead to an endless and unfruitful search for a "true" definition of humor. Problems arise when we see that none of these theories is able to cover all humorous examples solely. This means that these conditions are not sufficient, and maybe they are not necessary either. In this paper, we assume, then, a prototypical view of humor that tries to identify central features of paradigmatic instances of humor, features which, although perhaps absent from marginal cases, are present in most cases. The purpose is to attain a better understanding of the cognitive processes that are involved or even contribute to laughter in advertising discourse. Humor is culture oriented in that the processes from which humor arises involve the use of certain belief systems or cultural models of the audience. The second part of this work investigates how humorous discourse depends on, and reflects, our cultural model of language. These findings are based on a detailed analysis of television and radio advertisements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]