I’m sure this has been done before, but a t-shirt I saw recently prompted me to post. Wife and I were walking our dog through a park in our upper middleclass suburb. Middle-aged guy walked towards us with a dog. His black t-shirt read in large block red letters covering the entire front:
FUCK TRUMP. AND IF YOU LIKE TRUMP, FUCK YOU TOO.
Reading it, I had a weird sensation of dissonance, where I understood the words I was reading, but my brain sorta couldn’t accept that I was actually seeing them. As we passed, my wife said: “I agree with the sentiment, but don’t think I’d wear the shirt.”
Message was the same on the back.
So, you see any t-shirts - or bumper stickers - recently that impressed you as intending to provoke?
When I was in high school I flew down to L.A. to stay with my aunt and uncle while they gave me a tour of the various local colleges. On one of these outings we stopped by my uncle’s business so he could check on something. It was closed at the time but there was one employee there puttering about … a big, older dude wearing a t-shirt that said “If God Hadn’t Intended Man to Eat Pussy He Wouldn’t Have Shaped it Like a Taco”. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t expecting any visitors that day.
There was a shirt some guy in my high-school had; it was a cartoon earth with a bunch of colorful, geometrically simple, cartoon people standing on the edges. In big balloon letters, it said something like “one earth, one human race”. It looked like something from a book of nursery rhymes, or a children’s TV show.
My friend and I were walking by, and my friend stopped to comment on it, mentioning that the little people kind of resembled swastikas. The guy smiles and folds the shirt over itself at the naval, creating a new image, a big red swastika (which was made from the little red man on the top, and the little red man on the bottom) and the words ONE RACE. Really evil looking.
It was an impressive trick. Questionable taste, but excellent execution.
Seen on the back of a stereotypical biker chick: “Scooter trash.”
Seen on the back of a stereotypical biker dude: “If you can read this the bitch fell off.”
Hell, they might have both been dentists, but they totally looked the part.
At a restaurant a few days before Christmas last year, I saw a group of males (appeared to be two boys, their father, and his father) attired in shirts of different sizes but each bearing the slogan THE JOLLIEST ASSHOLES IN THE OUTHOUSE accompanied by a cartoon drawing of an old backwoods “one-holer”, complete with crescent moon over the door.
I made a T-shirt with “Don’t worry it still works” written on the front. It’s made for some interesting and unexpected interactions with random people.
