South Dakota has officially pulled its “Don’t Jerk and Drive” campaign, which puts an end to one of the weirder safe-driving campaigns to ever get pushed on the public. The campaign was originally supposed to keep driver aware of the risks of overcorrecting when driving on icy roads. You might jerk the wheel and end up skidding on ice and crashing. The roads can get icy in South Dakota.
See, that sounds perfectly innocent. This is where we’d usually goof on the authorities for accidentally coming up with some wording that sounded a lot more like a dirty joke. We have plenty of “Don’t Jerk and Drive” jokes ready to go already. But in a really weird twist, the Department of Public Safety was actually trying to be funny.
That didn’t work out. As explained by the secretary for the Department of Public Safety, “This is an important safety message, and I don’t want this innuendo to distract from our goal to save lives on the road.”
And so we lose the #DontJerkAndDrive hashtag, plus clever slogans like “Think before you jerk,” “Jerking isn’t a joke,” and “Keep calm and don’t jerk the wheel.” At least we still have this video–until they yank it. Can they yank it? Tax dollars paid for this thing, and we know that it’s just junk now, but we don’t think the government should be yanking taxpayer’s junk…
