What is it with joke car stickers?

I was driving along the other day and I saw this car with a blue, diamond-shaped card hanging in the back window saying “Cheeky Monkey on board”. Now, I’m sorry, but just what on earth is that all about. Who, I mean who???, would put a sign up in the back of their car saying “Cheeky Monkey on board” and … why? For the love of mike, why?

I mean someone actually spent good money on buying that and then went to the effort of putting it into their car. Why?

No, I’m not going to go into the old cliché about signs that say “Caution! Baby on board!” Obviously they are pointless – but I presume that the parents involved seem to think that other people might pay the blindest bit of notice to them. But, if this is the case, then surely the sensible thing would be for the parents involved to take the sign out when the baby isn’t in the car – boy that cried “Wolf!” and all that sort of thing – but they never, ever do. Those poxy, stupid signs just hang there for years.

Don’t they realise that even if these signs could work in theory, they invalidate them in practice by their own idleness. If emergency service vehicles had the blues-and-twos going the whole time, people would pay far less attention to them. It’s the same principle.

The only thing I can imagine is that it’s some sort of self-aggrandisement thing. “Oh, look, we’re responsible parents. We care enough about our child to hang some crappy piece of tat in the back of our car. Bow down, oh ye unworthy mortals!”

(Oddly enough and as an aside, someone did tell me the other day that “Caution! Show Dogs in transit” signs do serve a useful purpose because people with show dogs on board will drive more slowly and more carefully than “normal” drivers and therefore when you see a “Caution! Show Dogs in transit” you know to expect that that car might act a bit unusually.

Ok, well that’s fair enough, but the flaw in the plan is that the only people – apart, now, from you, dear readers – who know this are other show dog owners. The rest of the world remain blissfully ignorant. Surely it would be far more sensible and effective to have a sign that says “Caution! I am liable to drive erratically and irritate the fuck out of other road users!” Then we would all know where we stood.)

But, where the heck did “Cheeky Monkey on board” come from? It’s not a warning. It’s not a joke. It’s just some sort of advertisement that the owner of the vehicle is really, really, really sad. I mean, what do they think other road users are going to do? Put on that face and tone of voice one does when looking at a bunch of baby baa-lambs bouncing about in a meadow and say “Awwww! How sweet. Oh, look, she calls her child a ‘cheeky monkey’! What an endearing way of referring to the little darling’s spirit of adventure and individuality. Ah, she must be a super mum. Bless!”

Give me strength!

And this brings me on to the whole subject of joke stickers in cars. Listen, if you have a so-called joke sticker in or on your car, then unless you invented it yourself, it simply labels you as a sad-act. Ok. This is a rule.

Joke stickers on your car say one of two things about you, and neither of them are good.

Option A is that you have the sticker on your car because you personally still find it hilariously funny. Every morning you come out of your house, see the “love thy neighbour – but don’t get caught” sign and burst once again into fits of uncontrollable giggles over the unrestrained hilarity of it all. Ok, this is not good. Jokes are funny once, or maybe a couple of times, but once you’ve heard them, they stop being funny – unless you are seriously devoid of intelligence, humour or both – in which case don’t advertise it by putting a damned stupid joke sticker on your bumper.

Option B is that, deep-down, you know that your are seriously devoid of your own wit and humour and you are trying to cover it up by putting a joke sticker on your car in the desperately vain hope that people will somehow assume that you invented the joke and that therefore you must be a really funny and interesting person whom they would really like to get to know.

Look, it’s a mass-produced bumper sticker, ok? Unless you have a vinyl printing press in your house, we know you didn’t make it up, ok. Give it up. It’s someone else’s joke, not yours. You aren’t funny. Live with it.

The exception to this rule are the people who do make up their own bumper stickers (it does happen) or who adapt bumper stickers or use them in new ways that put a different – and original – slant on the humour.

A case in point was a bumper sticker that was popular way back when that you used to see on old bangers that said “My other car is a Porsche”. Simply hilarious. However, I did give a wry smile when I saw someone driving around with that sticker on a Porsche. That person had taken the old “joke” and inverted it –giving it a bit of originality.

However then a year or so later, I saw someone driving around in a Porsche with a professionally made sticker that say “My other car is also a Porsche”. Totally failing to understand that by adding the “also” they had completely killed any originality that might have been in the idea and turned it into a straight “The owner of this vehicle is a self-satisfied, smug, humourless wanker” notice.

Joke bumper sticker are crap. Don’t do it.

Here endeth the rant.