October 23, 2011

Thoughts I Had While Folding “Humorous” T-Shirts.

I guess I’m like… a T-shirt hipster or something. I’m very particular about shirts. They are serious fucking business. Because of this, I would never be caught dead in anything my employer sells. They are almost universally horrible, stupid garments, and I really just want to punch anyone I see purchasing them. Of course, tonight, I was left folding them for quite a length of time, so I got to get a good look at them. Here are some thoughts I had.

There was a shirt that said “Stewie” with a picture of Stewie Griffin on it that seemed to, obviously, be a sendup of Scarface for some reason. This made me think about Stewie as a character vs Stewie as merchandise. In merchandise, Stewie is as he was in, oh, the first episode of Family Guy. One note, only catch phrases from the first episode, etc. But recent seasons of Family Guy that I have had the misfortune of seeing have decided that Stewie is now a gay stereotype. He is the character they use for gay jokes. He is nothing like ANY merchandise with him on it. Supposedly someone who would buy such a horrible shirt would be a fan of the show. Do they really not see the huge change in character he’s made? Do they not care?

Even Kohl’s cannot ruin how awesome Adventure Time is, thankfully. Though of their shirt offerings, I feel the one with Jake and Finn fist-bumping really does not need the text on it. The other one, with the many action faces of Finn, is fantastic, and I almost would buy it. For serious.

I am really pissed that “Press Button, Receive Bacon” is on a shirt. I remember the first time I saw that particular piece of bathroom graffiti. I thought it was hilarious. Now it is on a shirt. It’s jumped the shark. Plus, the joke is not a joke outside of the context of the actual air dryer. It doesn’t WORK on a shirt.

There are a ton of Angry Birds shirts. It is obvious to me that someone saw Angry Birds being popular, said “We must make shirts,” but then did not actually have any ideas for shirts. Yet they made like 10 of them for Kohl’s alone. The little “humorous” sayings on many of the shirts just make no sense. Why does this have anything to do with Angry Birds? I will give a pass only to the “The Bird is the Word” shirt, which is acceptable, though nothing I would possibly wear. I could see people who play the game finding that entertaining, though.

The number of shirts with the exact same jokes shirts have had on them since I was young enough to think these jokes funny is just… depressing. I mean, I guess every year someone is old enough to find these funny for the first time? But you’d think that someone could actually come up with more jokes. When they do come up with another joke, about 10 different variants of that joke seem to appear on the scene. Someone must have thought recently “Ha ha, a pig being horrified at bacon is funny!” because there are tons of variants of that now. Sometimes, look, it’s a chicken and some KFC instead! Ha ha! Hilarious!

Yeah. Shirts. So wonderfully stupid. I’m so above this shit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to lay out my My Little Pony Steampunk shirt for tomorrow. (I’m so cool.)

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