Funny Highway Signs
As we return to our regularly scheduled looks at humor, I am working on a recent issue related to humor: humorous traffic signs and the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways). But before we get there, what is the MUTCD? This document provides information on text choice, messaging, and sign placement for any and all signs that will appear on a highway. Every type of sign, whether it be a mile marker, an exit sign, or an AMBER alert is discussed. It’s a real page turner. (We’ll come back to this point a bit later) I can tell you that reading just a snippet of that manual was as exciting as you can imagine. Thank goodness for the ctrl+F function, or I might have had to start drinking. You wouldn’t think that the MUTCD has any room for humor, and you’d be right. But it does talk about humor. So let’s get into it.
Recently, there have been a couple articles stating that the new MUTCD forbids the use of humorous messages in highway signs. It seems the AP was the original source of the reporting and it got picked up by various other outlets. But the main point of the reporting is that the federal government was banning the use of signs that use humorous, or less than direct language in any sign. Favorites such as “We’ll be blunt, don’t drive high” and “Hocus Pocus drive with focus” are ones that are out there and would be considered problematic under the new guidelines. To be clear, the humorous messages largely appear on electronic signs, so their shelf life is shorter than the fixed ones that are more abundant. Humorous electronic messages have become favorites with some state departments of transportation, and there have even been some contests inviting submissions, like the ones for naming snowplows.
The text “banning” signs from the MUTCD that is at issue is the following. “Messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous, should not be used as they might be misunderstood or understood only by a limited segment of road users and require greater time to process and understand.” (2L.07 04 p. 519) The text certain indicates that humor “should not be used,” but the majority of reporting claimed this amounted to a ban. A spokesperson representing the government in this suggested that it wasn’t a ban, but rather a suggestion that such an approach should be avoided. More importantly, no funding would be denied if such messaging were used in certain locales—and this denial of funding was reported to be true by some outlets. This didn’t stop certain politicians from tying this language to larger culture wars about governmental overreach and the like.
Rather than get into a rather pointless debate on how this manual furthers governmental overreach, let’s look at some of the relevant issues. One of the main points of documents like the MUTCD is to create uniformity of signage across the country, which is then supposed to promote safety and ease of travel for highway drivers. Safety is the primary concern. The reasoning behind the language warning against humor is that using such messages does a couple of things. First it may not reach all the drivers. Humor requires people to process the humor which often is a more complicated bit of mental work than reading a sign whose meaning is readily apparent. Speed signs tell us to drive a maximum of 55 MPH. Not 11x5 MPH. Also, the drivers would all have to have the requisite background knowledge to get the joke. With regard to the latter, if the humor relies on a too obscure piece of info, it will miss and possibly confuse some drivers. Some people might not know that a marijuana signature is sometimes called a blunt, and not get the word play in “We’ll be blunt. Don’t drive high.” If processing a joke requires more cognitive energy and distracts drivers, then this is clearly a bad thing when hurtling along the highway in a car. If the message is too long, this too could distract drivers which is why the MUTCD counsels that messages be brief. Some of the worries and critiques of the use of humorous signs are nicely spelled out here.
But the issue is empirical plain and simple. In order to know whether or not the signs are effective we’d need to see if there are any negative or positive effects on the drivers who are experiencing those signs. The author of the critical article sited at the end of the paragraph above thinks there aren’t any reasons to adopt these sorts of signs. Furthermore, and this is really the main point of that article, with the limited resources that are currently dedicated to highway safety and the epidemic levels of accidents, we should stop wasting our efforts, energy, and resources in such ways. But the author doesn’t give us any direct evidence that the signs are actually unsafe. The case made in the article is indirect. While this may be helpful in initially making a decision, it’s not sufficient to consider the matter closed. There is other indirect evidence that humor is helpful in recall, in catching people’s attention and the like.
The best we can say about the situation now, is that hackneyed phrase academics love to use. There is more research needed. The problem is, this sort of research needs to be funded, and it might be a tough sell to ask a granting agency to give money to look at the