Public health campaigns are designed to save lives, but sometimes they end up having an unexpected second life: becoming slang, catch phrases or ironic in-jokes. This is often called the ‘irony trap’, where serious health messages are reinterpreted by the public as humour, rebellion or shorthand for cultural observation.

In France, for example, the government’s mandatory warning on cigarette packs, ‘Le tabac nuit gravement à la santé’ (Tobacco seriously harms your health), started being shortened to ‘nuigrave’ in street slang in the 2000s, referring ironically to the cigarettes themselves. Instead of encouraging smokers to quit, the warning becomes part of counterculture: gallow’s humour, not dissimilar to ‘cancer stick’ or ‘coffin nail’ in Anglophone cultures.

Why do public health messages often backfire?

When health messages fall into the irony trap, it is often because of message fatigue as one of the main factors behind it. When people see messages like “Smoking Kills”, “Drink Responsibly” many times a day, every day, people tend to start tuning them out. Examples of this are the Covid stickers that are still in many stores, still in 2025, about mask-wearing, about physical distancing, but our eyes simply do not see them anymore. We automatically filter them out as irrelevant. Or, rather, not relevant for the here and now.

Worse than tuning out, however, is when messages are reframed through humour. This is often done to soften the cognitive dissonance between the action (smoking) and the warning (graphically stating risk of the action).

It is a form of cultural detachment that happens all around the world and across many spheres of life:

·       Safe sex promotion campaigns, such as the UK’s “no glove, no love” that become tongue-in-cheek catchphrases in nightlife and pop culture, even invoking quotes from these campaigns when engaging in risky sexual activities.

·       Anti-drunk driving lines that are quoted sarcastically, such as the Australian one: “If you drink and drive, you’re a bloody idiot”.

·       Anti-drug Public Service Announcements, such as those in USA in the 1980s “Just Say No” and “This is your brain on drugs” that become widely parodied.

This hijacking of messaging is often because the health campaigns themselves feel top-down, preaching, patronising or out of touch. Also, humour, particularly amongst youths, serves as a social bonding tool, allowing peers to reclaim control over narratives that might feel moralising or that they have little control over.

Meme culture as accelerants

In the digital age of today, irony spreads faster than ever. Social media platforms like TikTok, X and Instagram make it easy for serious messages to be recontextualised into viral jokes or remix content.

The Covid-19 pandemic provided fertile ground for this. Slogans such as “flatten the curve” and “stay home, save lives”, originally intended to communicate the urgent need to reduce hospital overload, found its way into memes. We all laughed at them. Why? Because we were fatigued and many of these memes came as blessed relief.

In some ways, the memes help: they keep the public health messaging in circulation. But then the tone often shifts from sincerity to one of detached irony.

Ironic reinterpretation, or the irony trap, often happens when the intention is to trivialise the intended effect of deterrence:

·       In some countries like Brazil, where cigarette packs display graphic health warnings such as what lung cancer, head or neck cancer or oral cancer through smoking looks like, these images are often swapped in a dark ‘trading card’ phenomenon.

·       In the USA, people who had been through the D.A.R.E anti-drug programme in the 1990s were given T-Shirts, with messages like ‘D.A.R.E to resist drugs and violence’, which were often worn ironically in counterculture scenes.

·       In Australia, smokers have rebranded the olive-green, non-branded plain cigarette packs as ‘ugly sticks’ to ridicule the attempt at deterrence.

So, how can health authorities communicate effectively when audiences actively subvert the message?

The danger of trivialisation

When health warnings become in-jokes, the intended emotional impact may fade. What was designed to trigger reflection, or even fear, often becomes part of the cultural backdrop, stripped of its original seriousness.

For public health workers, this is a frustrating dilemma:

·       Do they now need to double down on shock tactics?

·       Do they soften the message?

·       Do they try to join the joke themselves, which could risk further trivialisation?

More crucially, does it mean that the health message has been a success or a failure? A success, in the sense that, yes, the message has reached the maximum amount of people. And a failure in terms of it being trivialised, even mocked.

But then, what should be the role of public health messaging anyway? Is it to provide the message and try to nudge people towards healthier behaviours? Is it to be more forceful, where the nudging becomes expected change, subject to sanction if the receiver of the message fails to comply? We have seen in these post-pandemic years how that strategy of perceived overreach has turned out.

The next article will focus on how some campaigns have successfully avoided this trap and have inspired real change without becoming the butt of an in-joke.

 Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025