Black humour in bumper stickers in Jordan

The paper examines black humour in bumper stickers in Jordan. The study has examined a corpus of 31 stickers selected from a larger corpus containing up to 285 stickers collected by the researcher himself while on the road. The study shows that the stickers with black humour cover four topics: the negative characteristics of the driver, the low value or the small size of the car, the miserable economic conditions of the driver, and finally lack of faith in life and people. These stickers are considered humorous since they voluntarily disclose top personal or family issues. In addition to the themes disclosed, the stickers utilise some linguistic devices that might arouse humour including metaphor, hyperbole, word ambiguity, irony and saying something that does not match reality. The paper has also found that the linguistic resources of black humour are no different from the resources of humour in general; however, the topics of black humour are all the time negative.