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For more than thirty-five years, I’ve always begun this column with the same words: “All joking aside.” This has traditionally been used as a facetious overture before laying satirically into the various causes celebre with which I take umbrage. It’s really quite funny, if you’re smart. If you don’t find that funny, there’s a good chance you are considered the dumb person in your area. But even you, your area’s dumbest person, must have it within you to imagine how serious I am when I throw aside three decades of tradition to say what I say to you now…all joking really aside, my partner and I are pregnant with our first child. Neither a bit, nor a government experiment, nor the culmination of a Romani curse, the human baby currently in a parasitic relationship with my wife will soon be among us. That’s going to happen. It’s too late to change that now. I asked.

In my own estimation and that of the state, the least I can do as its presumptive father is learn what I can of the proper feeding, clothing, schooling, and defenestration of the modern baby before its ejection from the womb. For example, a brief skim of the first parenting book in my collection – Oxford’s English Dictionary – informs me that I didn’t mean to say “defenestration,” and am probably confusing that word with a different one. Good. This is going great. Let’s reset.

Babies! Everybody loves babies. As you join me on a continuing journey of learning by doing and discovering by googling, my hope is to leave my joking days aside for good and all, and pick up instead the heavy mantle of the pater familias. My goodwife is presently nineteen handspans across and our local vet is busy hobbling horses until the spring thaw, so we’ve got some time yet. For an easy start on our road to fatherhood, where better to turn our attention than things sartorial? The kid will need clothes, that’s certain. Fortunately for me the internet has some, and all it took was a quick survey via the Shopping tab to educate myself on the subject. For example, did you know onesies can be worn by children even before age one? Or that pirates will not constantly attack your baby to try and steal their booties? That time in our history has long passed.

What seems to be hip these days, see, is –

uh, okay, haha. well jeez –

ew, do i have safesearch off? No, that’s not it. What if I –

wow

holy fuck

holy shit

I kind of don’t understand how the F.B.I. aren’t knocking on my door right now.

After further research, it looks like there are five main types of baby clothes available online, which I’m now going to present in order of how painful it will be for you to learn each category exists. Please treat this inventory not only as a crash course on clothing your baby, but also like your own personal episode of Hot Ones with implied pedophilia in place of wing sauce. Okay? Please do that. Here we fucking go.

Horror Level 1 – For the Memesters

Babies are essentially our attempt to project the best of ourselves further into the future, so it’s hardly surprising to learn that people like to get a little cheeky and slap pop culture references on their baby’s clothes. It’s a fun way of showcasing their own taste, and signaling the kind of cultural legacy they hope to pass on. It hardly matters if the baby “gets it;” in fact, that’s a part of the fun! Do you think this smiley boy understands the significance of combining Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Munch’s The Scream, and the killer from Scream into one painting? How can he? I don’t!

What I do understand is the reference below, uttered over thirty years ago in a film that child will absolutely never watch unless forced to, and the subtext of which is “hey, come over here and try to shoot me, let’s fight to the death with our guns, this statement is an open invitation to attackers.”

Another thing it is fun to mock babies for is their ignorance. Thanks to the toddler shirt below, we adults can share a good laugh about the fact that the baby wearing it obviously doesn’t remember that time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick. Hopefully they also forget that we dressed them like this, then stood around with our adult friends laughing at them.

Oh, and it says “dick” on it, too! That’s extra funny, because traditionally babies are supposed to be shielded from profanity. I wonder how far we could take that idea and still think it was very, very funny? This far?

Nope, too far! Let’s pull the lever in the opposite direction.

Oops, I pulled the lever in the same direction so hard that now it’s just spinning around and around! But in its defense, the intended joke of this shirt isn’t strictly that the toddler understands proper blowjob technique, merely that they can hang with dank memes enough to [child removed from the home by social services].

Horror Level 2 – For the Hipsters

Snobby baby clothes are just like meme baby clothes, but one notch worse because they require effort to understand. Prove your superior intellect by turning your baby into a puzzle that reveals the word “HORNY” if you stare at it long enough!

Now, strangers will stare at your baby for a long time and then go “Ohhhhh…horny,” and you and your kiddo can laugh and laugh as they receive swift mob justice. Come to think of it, this is a great way to punish anyone that solves the puzzle. Congratulations, your baby is the Lament Configuration.

This other toddler shirt from a completely different shop nevertheless utilizes the same puzzle design, which by its very nature encourages strangers to ask you things like “may I raise your baby’s shirt up a little, just to fold it up, just to see? I just want to see something.” In video game design this is referred to as “ludonarrative,” and is illegal in forty-six of the contiguous United States.

Or hey, maybe you just want strangers to photograph your baby’s chest? I can understand that. With this handy tee, anyone who points their phone at the fruits of your loin will be linked directly to the results page for a google search of the phrase “rock out with your cock out.” So, you know, if anyone takes a picture of your toddler and then starts to take their cock out, be careful – the rock music might wake the baby!

Horror Level 3 – For the Edgelords

That’s right, bitches. Not only have all the baby shirts up to this point not been explicitly trying to offend you, we’ve now reached levels of offensiveness so grimy that I’ve unconsciously transitioned from my intellectual comedy writing voice to the comedy writing voice I do where you can hear my real voice in your head saying the words as you read it. Dude, check this shit out.

You can tell it’s for girls because it’s pink! Here’s another one you can tell is for girls, because of the deep folkloric connections between elephants and fertility in both Hindu and Buddhist cultures.

Or perhaps I’m the one with his mind in the gutter. “Squirter” does seem like a pretty fucking wild thing to print on what you’re explicitly marketing as an “embarrassing” toddler shirt, but maybe the manufacturer means that the kid pees during diaper changes and embarrasses you. There’s still wiggle room here! Humanity could still be worth saving! Cue next shirt.

It’s cotton though you guys, at least there’s that. Not a single hair of synthetic fiber will rash up your poor kid’s skin as they suck titties, shit themselves, or take an important business call.

If you’re uncomfortable printing swears right directly on your kid, fret not! There are several other options that allow your child to theoretically maintain their innocence while still achieving your core goal of automatically telling every single person who looks at them to fuck off. Here’s a shirt that takes “flipping the bird” literally, and “the sanctity of childhood” lightly!

This of course opens us up to a whole range of visual puns, neatly circumventing social norms and allowing for even the most obscene aspects of our shared cultural lexicon to shine through. Think of your baby as just another social media feed – a place to post some funny images to let everyone know how funny you are.

Oh yeah. If I saw your baby wearing that shirt, I would immediately know exactly how funny you are. And there’s no limit to how much “get to know ya” information can be transmitted in shirt form! Thanks to fine outlets like Brisco Baby, your child’s shirt can indicate everything from where they just came from…

…to a bit about their cultural background…

…or even some of their favorite hobbies!

Naturally, true edgelord maniacs won’t want to stop at sexual innuendo when there’s a whole world of woke snowflakes to offend through the medium of child abuse. Why wrap your son or daughter in basic filth when you could be denigrating a whole civil rights movement at the same time?

The further down the unwell you go, the more the offensive toddler shirts do away with any semblance of design sense or wordplay until we finally reach the bottom, a thin stack of tiny black tees with big block letters spelling generically awful things presumably written by an A.I. that’s been fed the entire rotten.com forum archives.

And in case you’re sitting there thinking “well, that could just be a normal edgelord slogan aimed at adults and mistakenly printed on a tiny tee,” wrap your fractured mind around this shirt, clearly designed for a baby to wear by someone who understands at least the rudiments of how babies work (ie, they come from whores).

Please note that this particular shirt can be tricky to deploy, since it’s only at its most funny if you hold the baby facing a particular way. If you don’t, it’s less funny, but still quite funny.

Horror Level 4 – Don’t Molest My Kid!

Now, however, I’m afraid we’re moving past funny and into offensive. I know I’ve used the word “offensive” many times already, but what I’m about to show you redefines what offensive means to the degree that the “smells like sluts” shirt is, in retrospect, actually totally fine. Like, I would much rather clad my child in the sluts shirt than a shirt that invites people to, say, show them their butthole – however classily.

My concern, see, is that I’d end up in a situation where I’m telling a judge that someone showed my kid their butthole and the defense attorney pulls out a little vacuum baggie with this shirt in it marked “Exhibit A” and they drop the case. Fortunately for people like me, there are a number of toddler shirts that explicitly warn people away from their precious, developing junk.

See? You’re thinking of that boy’s scrotum now, but not of touching it. You’re thinking of not touching that little boy’s scrotum. Isn’t that a much nicer kind of way to be thinking about that boy’s scrotum? Sure it is.

Hell, the kid rocking this tee couldn’t be clearer! Their eighteen months on this earth have already taught them that life is one non-stop ass-reaming, so molesting them would just be overkill, ya dig? Stay away, stranger! Just maintain your distance and look at that teddy’s expression, for its dead eyes are the perfect avatar for the baby who’s seen it all, the jaded newborn already well aware that existence is one big diaper and we’re all the poopoocaca.

Horror Level 5 – Don’t Molest My Kid 😉

That was the end of the article. The title above this line is a misprint. You can click away now, or do one of your little comments, or call your congressman or exorcist, whatever you need. The rest of the stuff below here is not even content, in fact, but rather a handy device I invented to quickly ratchet up the level of disgust you are able to feel inside of you at one time. The more you scroll down, the worse it gets. Ready?!

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-

-eeeeeeeeeeee-

-eeeeeeeeeeee’re so cooked.

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