Friday Funny: All Signs Point to a Miserable Commute

Most road signs these days seem distressingly obsolete—navigation systems do the work of telling us how far we have left to travel, and posted speed limit signs are a joke of varying cruelty depending on what kind of road they're positioned next to.

So a road sign found in a recent New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast is simply refreshing and surprisingly rich in its commentary on the current experience of driving.

First the sign voices an opinion held by many, many people: that driving is a miserable experience that seems to compel vulgarisms.

Add a sprawling, rural scene to the site of this particular traffic jam and the mention of a "billion miles" worth of roads, however, and the sense of deepening problem emerges. Call it modern despair, perhaps.

You might have to flip through a few other cartoons on the New Yorker website to find Chast's work, but you can also see the cartoon on the New Yorker's Twitter feed.