Art & Creativity Quote by David Cross

Bumper stickers are Cross's perfect villain: a tiny rectangle that pretends complexity can be flattened into a slogan and still feel like a personality. The gripe is comic, but the target is serious. He’s not just dunking on tacky typography; he’s attacking the way public identity gets reduced to ready-made scripts. In Cross’s world, the sticker is a shortcut that lets you outsource thinking to a catchphrase, then drive around as if conviction were the same thing as comprehension.

The line "you can't sum anything up" is deliberately absolute. Cross talks like a guy swatting away an annoying fly, but the absolutism is the joke and the warning: reduction is seductive because it’s efficient. His real punch is in "caricaturist corner". That phrase does a lot of work. It suggests that once you broadcast a single-position identity marker, you invite strangers to complete the drawing for you. You become an outline someone else can shade in: liberal, conservative, crunchy, gun guy, whatever. It’s not self-expression; it’s self-satire, a preemptive simplification that makes you easier to dismiss and easier to market to.

Contextually, this fits Cross’s post-alt-comedy sensibility: suspicious of received narratives, allergic to tribal branding, impatient with how politics turns into merch. The intent isn’t to plead for neutrality; it’s to mock certainty-as-aesthetic. The subtext is that slogans don’t just communicate beliefs - they discipline them, locking you into a pose you have to keep performing long after the moment of insight (or anger) has passed.