You can spot them in the parking lot of a grocery store. They catch your eye at a red light or while stuck in traffic. You squint to read: What do they mean by “Former Baby on Board” or “Keep honking I’m eating your girl’s pasta fagiole”?
Gone are the days of earnest “Coexist” or “Free Tibet” bumper stickers. Nowadays, they are dipped in irony with a healthy dose of absurdity.
This new crop of bumper stickers are part of a growing trend of merch being made almost exclusively to be photographed and shared on social media as much as to be absorbed in the real world. And the buy-in is broad, ranging from the boutique media empire Dirt to the fashion brand J. Crew. You may find them at your favorite bar, or in a wedding gift bag.
“We’re known as the bumper sticker couple now, I’m sure,” said Brian Gebhart, 32, who, with his fiancée, Alyssa Walker, 30, runs Frog Mustard, one of the most prolific creators of this genre of bumper stickers. They release a handful of new ones each week to their more than 35,000 Instagram followers, whom they call the Frog Army.
The couple started the company last winter, after Mr. Gebhart had a mountain biking accident and needed extra money to pay for a surgery. They came up with Frog Mustard — a moniker as nonsensical as many of their designs — by using a random name generator.
Their first designs included a sticker that read “E.T. for City Council” and another with a crying kitten and an appeal to fellow drivers: “Sorry for speeding! But my cat is at home alone!”
By the spring, after a series of viral TikTok posts, the business was growing ever faster. Soon, the couple was investing in an industrial vinyl printer and operating out of their basement home office in Kent, Wash. The business is now a full-time job for Mr. Gebhart, and Ms. Walker maintains a corporate tech job while producing many of the designs.
Frog Mustard now averages 1,200 orders a month with a stock of about 350 designs, they said.
As of late, these include popular stickers like “on my way to get a lobotomy,” “I’m pro-sexualizing the green M&M and I vote!” and “Deny, Defend, Depose” (a reference to the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive), among hundreds of others, some of which are the result of ideas people submit through their website. The couple describe their oeuvre as “brain rot stickers.”
In American culture, where cars are often seen as physical extensions of their owners’ personality, bumper stickers have long been a way to make a vehicle distinctly your own, reflecting your politics and interests. They used to represent earnestness and authenticity: This car really did climb Mount Washington; I do support this presidential candidate; my child actually is an honor student.
“Bumper stickers used to actually say something about the person,” said Elizabeth Goodspeed, a graphic designer based in Rhode Island. Now, she said, “they don’t tell me anything about the person beyond that they are on the internet.”
A few years ago, Christopher DeLoach, an artist in Los Angeles, created a sticker that read “Keep honking! I’m listening to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 meteoric sensation ‘Universal Consciousness,’” a play on a bumper sticker from the 1980s and ’90s: “Keep Honking, I’m Listening to Jazz.”
“I wrote the copy in literally one minute,” Mr. DeLoach told GQ in 2022.
It went viral on and off bumpers and seemed to touch off a wider phenomenon, giving way to zanier plays on the vintage sticker like “Honk if you have a smooth brain.”
In many ways, these stickers are simply memes in real life. While you are likely to spot absurd bumper stickers on streets and highways, you are probably just as likely to come across a photo of one shared on X or Instagram.
“Like memes, they’re just designed to be photographed, designed for you to post on your Instagram story,” Ms. Goodspeed said.
While the humor of the stickers is closely entangled with the internet, many people reach back in time for inspiration. The ones Nick Singer, a designer and content creator in Keyport, N.J., makes for his shop, the Back Lot, often refer to the slogans and styles of the 1970s and ’80s.
Lately, his most popular sticker has been one that reads “Legalize asbestos.”
“I just thought, what’s the most absurd stance to have?” Mr. Singer, 27, said. “If I had made it ‘legalize fracking,’ then it would be a political thing. That’s an actual issue people discuss. But to want to legalize asbestos is just such an absurd concept that it lightens the mood.”
Mr. Singer said his bumper stickers used what he called the semi-ironic humor popular among Generation Z — which he said made up most of his customer base.
One young driver with whom it resonates is Samuel Hutsell, a transit security guard in Vancouver, Wash. He has three of Mr. Singer’s bumper stickers on his Chrysler 300. “When I’m looking in my rearview mirror, I can see people point and chuckle, and it always makes my day,” Mr. Hutsell, 20, said.
He said the off-kilter bumper stickers helped set his car apart from other, drabber ones on the road. To him, they appear too sleek.
“Cars in the early 2000s were all bubbly and unique,” he lamented. “Nowadays, it’s all angular, boxy. They don’t feel like cars; they feel like appliances.”
Ms. Walker’s and Mr. Gebhart’s two cars, a Toyota Corolla and a Tacoma, are both covered in bumper stickers, which leads to some funny interactions. Once, when a police officer pulled over Mr. Gebhart for a traffic stop, he asked about a sticker that made a crude but somewhat obscure sexual joke about the founding fathers. Mr. Gebhart was tongue-tied.
“The other night we were sitting at the light, and someone honked,” he said of a more recent episode. “I’m like, ‘Why are they honking? Oh my God, they’re probably honking at my stickers.’”
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