abstract: advertisements are the most accessible type of authentic materials, and this is one reason why they are used more and more in english teaching classes. for this cause, studies in the field of advertisements are very widespread nowadays. for pun is one aspect which makes advertisements more interesting, it is used more than before in advertisements. use of puns makes an advertisement more memorable and persuasive. many researchers have studied the persuasive effect of puns on consumers; however, this effect of puns was never studied on persian consumers. this research has studied the persuasive effect of puns on persian consumers, and the prevalent contexts of using puns in both persian and english advertisements. in this study 700 english advertisements from the american best seller magazine cosmopolitan and 560 advertisements from the persian best seller magazine khanevadeh sabz [green family] from 2005 to 2011 were analyzed and compared together. the result induces that puns were used in different contexts in persian and english advertisements. puns containing persian advertisements mostly advertise food products while puns containing english advertisements frequently advertise make-up products. moreover, this study suggests that puns are used in english advertisements more than persian. the outcome of this research reports that using puns has increased in both persian and english advertisements. analyzing the data of this investigation manifests that there was a fall in using puns in persian advertisements in 2011. the reason for this decrease can be the preference of food producing companies to advertise on tv. moreover, in this study, puns in persian and english advertisements are analyzed based on the taxonomy of mcquarrie and mick (1996). this analysis revealed that since puns are used typically in slogans, lexical puns are more dominant in both persian and english advertising discourse than pictorial puns. besides, persian and american advertisers have different tastes in using different types of puns introduced in mcquarrie and micks (1996) taxonomy. in general, it can be concluded that english and persian magazine advertisers are completely independent from each other in using puns. besides, the persuasive effect of puns was examined on 50 female english majoring participants at shiraz university and 50 female participants who were toefl students of iran language institute of shiraz. these participants faced english and persian puns contacting advertisements and advertisements with no puns in a mock magazine incidentally. the result indicates that puns in advertisements have persuasive effect on persian consumers, and this effect is more for easier-to-process puns containing advertisements. this study revealed that both english and non-english majoring participants appreciated puns in advertisements equally. in addition, this experiment uncovered the fact that advertisements help learners with learning new vocabulary.