Oh, I See What You Did There

3rd place in Derby #180: Complementary Colors, with 577 votes!

It’s a visual gag, you see. It all takes place in the mind. When somebody hears “tee shirt” while looking at a drawing of tea on a shirt, they might have that moment when they go OHHHHH and then they can laugh or groan or call security or whatever it is they’re gonna do. And, in the real world, that can work! That can totally work! But when you’re just reading the computer screen, your brain operates on a whole different set of rules.

Like, if we write the word “tea”, you know right away that we’re not using the word “tee”. And then if we try and pair them up, people just get angry. “I saw you write tee!” they’ll say, “Don’t try to trick me on this!” And suddenly, people start looking for ways to blame the writers for all these new emotions that the writers didn’t actually cause.

And so one guy gets all focused on if we should have put the commas INSIDE the quotations, and another guy decides to defend us because he just wants to fight, and suddenly all sorts of people are justifying themselves with giant paragraphs from Strunk and White and other people are posting “lol whom carz” and the first people aren’t going to let that go so there’s all of a sudden a big battle on the forums and now nobody’s paying attention to the shirt except for some pleasant nerds who write ”/ducks” before stating their opinion on the matter which means Disney’s on the phone because they think we’re violating the trademark on Uncle Scrooge and we’ve got to run to the comic store to find evidence that he’s really a goose because Dave swears he remembers seeing that in a Ken Jennings answer once upon a time and meanwhile, nobody’s at home to feed the baby and so it runs away to live among the apes and once a baby’s lived with the apes, it just won’t ever come back and act like a human, it just won’t. It’s over.

And that’s why the writers hate dealing with visual gags. It’s just so hard to do them justice.

Wear this shirt: if you’re tea gentry. Yeah, he’s gonna hear that one around the office next week.

Don’t wear this shirt: if you’re Ice T. Look, man, we love your work and if you want to give us a shout out we’d be thrilled, but this shirt would not fit your personal style. No offense.

This shirt tells the world: “I bought a second shirt so we could have tea for tw… oh, you’re with Disney. Guess we shouldn’t talk until after the ruling, then. My bad.”

We call this color: Basically It’s Just Grass In A Bag.

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