The legendary Spinal Tap guitarist David St. Hubbins once said the difference between stupid and clever is a fine line. Sometimes it's as thin as a thread. But sometimes it's as wide as a chasm.

View photos

This week, news broke of an astoundingly stupid pro-Ohio State T-shirt making its way around Columbus using the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal as a way to take a bank-shot jab at Michigan. "I'd rather shower at Penn State," the shirt read, "than cheer for the Wolverines."

Ha! Get it? Because molestation is a funny joke. Go Bucks! O-H-I-O!

All right, it's not like this is in any way sanctioned or approved by the university. To be fair, shirts with the exact same punchline have shown up at both Iowa and LSU, and we'd imagine that those universities (and the vast majority of their fans) are every bit as disgusted and embarrassed by their T-shirts. (LSU has the most to hang its head about; its T-shirt featured the grammatical error of "then" rather than "than," seemingly turning showering and rooting for a rival into items on a to-do list.)

This isn't a referendum on what is and isn't funny. There's nothing that can't be made funny – there are even a few funny jokes about, say, 9/11 – but oh, does it take a deft comedian to pull off humor in the face of tragedy. And a comedian with that kind of skill isn't printing up t-shirts and selling them by hand, cash-only, to tailgaters at Ohio State football games.

No, this is a case of How Freaking Stupid Can You Be? Look, college students' very existence is a four-year stumble from one bad decision to the next, with the hope that somewhere along the way you clean yourself up enough that you can graduate. At that point, you'll realize that making, or even buying, a shirt that clumsily yokes fandom to child rape is a phenomenally stupid idea.

"Sadly, that would be an item that people would want," says Mark Cracraft, textbook manager at Buckeye Books, a Columbus store selling Ohio State merchandise. "It's not something we or any other reputable store would carry."

Instant current-events T-shirts can be a profitable little side business; anybody with access to a screen printer can crank out a boxful of ready-to-wear-on-Saturday T-shirts in just a couple hours.

"Each big story that's in the news, we decide on an individual basis whether it's something we want to make a T-shirt about," says Josh Sneed of LookAtMeShirts.com. "It's a gray area, what some people will find funny and some won't."

[Related: Dan Wetzel's podcast: Is Michigan overrated?]

When the allegations against Sandusky first broke, Sneed, a professional comedian, produced a "State Penn" T-shirt on which the Nittany Lion is replaced with a running shower head. "That got some people upset," he recalls. "We had some people asking why we were making money off the tragedy. Our take is that as comedians and business owners, we weren't glorifying what happened. We thought it was a clever gag that would ruffle some feathers." Sneed said that his company did not contribute any revenue from the "State Penn" shirt to charitable causes, but has done so for other shirts.

And, for the record, when he saw the "I'd rather shower at Penn State" shirts, he wasn't surprised – "I've gotten kind of desensitized to shocking T-shirts" – but couldn't believe someone would sell it, and certainly wouldn't do so himself.

Story continues