Funny protest signs: what makes one work, and 26 ideas that do

Funny protest signs are the only part of a march that reliably outlives it. The chants fade by teatime, the crowd numbers get argued about for a fortnight, and then somebody’s bit of wonky cardboard is still doing laps of the internet three years later.

That is not an accident. A photographer walking a march is looking for one frame that explains the whole thing, and a good sign hands it over. So it is worth thinking about the cardboard for ten minutes before you write on it.

The five rules of a sign that travels

1. It has to be readable from across a road. The single most common mistake is writing an essay. A photograph is taken from six metres away and viewed on a phone. If it does not fit in eight words it is a leaflet, not a sign.

2. Specific beats general. “Stop the cuts” says nothing anybody can picture. Name the thing. Name the library, the ward, the bill, the number.

3. Funny gets photographed, angry gets ignored. This is unfair and it is also true. Editors will not run a photograph of a furious slogan, because it makes the crowd look frightening. They will absolutely run a woman in her seventies holding a joke about a minister’s haircut.

4. The joke should still work in a year. Reference the news cycle too tightly and the sign is a fossil by Friday. The ones that keep circulating are about the underlying absurdity rather than the specific tweet.

5. Write it big, then write it bigger. Everybody underestimates this. Marker pen on white card, block capitals, no fancy fonts, and leave a margin so your fingers do not cover the last word.

If this is your general area of grievance, you might enjoy our sister site Very Brexit Problems, which has been making roughly this joke since 2016.

The categories that actually work

The reluctant attendee

The most reliably photographed genre in the world. The comedy is that the person is visibly annoyed at having to be there at all, which reads as sincerity rather than politics.

• I cannot believe I still have to protest this
• This is not even my area of interest
• I made this sign at 6am, take me seriously
• So bad, even the introverts are here
• I would rather be gardening
• My other sign is also about this

The very polite threat

Understatement does more work than shouting. The gap between the mild wording and the obvious fury is the entire joke, and it is a particularly British register.

• We are all extremely disappointed
• I have written a strongly worded sign
• Consider this your notice
• We would like a word
• This has been noted

The one that uses their own words

Quoting the target back at themselves is the hardest kind of sign to argue with, because there is nothing to dispute. Pick something they said on the record, put it in quotation marks, add the date, and stop there. No commentary. The absence of a punchline is the punchline.

The wrong-genre sign

Borrowing the format of something entirely unrelated. It works because the eye reads the shape before the words and gets a small pleasant shock.

• A one-star review, written out in full
• A hotel complaint card
• Terms and conditions, with the important bit in tiny print
• A missing cat poster, with tear-off tabs
• An out of office reply
• A recipe with one alarming ingredient

The grandparent sign

If there is an older person in your group, the sign should go to them. A pensioner holding a mildly rude piece of cardboard is the single most published image from any march, anywhere, and it is because it undercuts every assumption the reader arrived with.

• I survived worse than this and I am still cross
• Back in my day we had a functioning one of these
• 82 and out here in the rain, what is your excuse
• I did not fight for this. I was busy, but still

The one about the sign

Self-aware to the point of collapse, and it lands because everybody there knows the feeling.

• No sign is big enough
• I ran out of cardboard before I ran out of reasons
• There were three more things but the pen died
• Sign number four this year
• The back of this sign is worse

The most famous protest sign ever made is not funny

Worth putting the whole thing in proportion before you go shopping for a punchline.

From February 1968, close to a thousand striking sanitation workers in Memphis marched twice a day from Clayborn Temple to City Hall carrying identical printed boards. Four words in heavy black capitals. I AM A MAN.

It is reportedly drawn from the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with the word invisible removed, and it carries an older echo as well. The abolitionist campaign of the eighteenth century had asked, in the form of a question, am I not a man and a brother. The Memphis strikers took the question mark off.

Every rule in this piece is in those four words. It is readable from across a road. It is short enough to take in while a camera is moving. It is first person, so it is a statement by the man holding it rather than a slogan about somebody else. And it is unanswerable, which is the quality a good joke and a great sign have in common.

Funny signs work for the same mechanical reasons. They are just aiming at a different target. Keep the Memphis boards in mind as the ceiling of the form and the rest of this becomes much easier to judge.

Four things that kill a sign

A pun that needs a second read. If the reader has to work it out, the photographer has already walked past.

Cursive. Beautiful handwriting is invisible at distance. Block capitals or nothing.

Anything obscene enough that a newspaper cannot print it. You have made a sign that is guaranteed not to be seen by anyone outside the march, which is the opposite of the point.

Thin card in the rain. By the second hour it will be a wet flag hanging off a stick. Tape a bin bag to the back before you leave the house.

Also read

If this is your sort of thing, try our collection of 14 quotes about fascism that everyone should read, or 9 of the world’s greatest thinkers on the evils of nationalism.