The 20 Most Awesome but Tremendously Geeky T-shirts

Posted at 5:01 AM Feb 13, 2008

By Zach Oat

It wasn’t that long ago that having a geeky T-shirt was a sign of failure and social incompetence. Best represented by the armpit-stained Punisher logo T-shirt favored by portly comics nerds the world over, any nerd who wanted to keep a modicum of self-respect had to forgo the geeky t-shirt, and simply reveal his nerdy by talking about Star Wars in mixed company.

Now, things have changed. The advent of nerds being cool has led to some truly cool—but still nerdy—T-shirts, available from nerd artistes across the internet, and ones any nerd should be proud to wear. Here are the 20 greatest shirts for nerds that look great, don’t automatically prevent you from getting laid, and are kind of stylish to boot.

20) Karate Kid: Sweep the Leg

The Cobra Kai dojo from The Karate Kid has become a universally recognized symbol of evil, with John Kreese as the unholy cult leader. But to boil the dojo’s complete lack of honor down to those three words—three words that, when spoken by Kreese, actually cause ’80s teen bully William Zabka to seem like a sympathetic character—is to create pure, concentrated evil. If this shirt were a portal to another dimension, Kreese would be General Zod, waiting to be unleashed on the world. Geeks, be afraid.

19) Office Space: Stapler

Office Space is another cult film that has been embraced by the unwashed, working masses, so a shirt needs to do something special to call itself geeky. By focusing on the red stapler that changes hands in one scene, unwittingly setting in motion events that will bring the film to a smoking finale, this ThinkGeek shirt has summed up a great film in one single piece of flair. And if you don’t get THAT reference, then this write-up is geekier than I thought.

18) You Sank My Battleship

While board games are fun for the whole family, some are geekier than others. Battleship, in its pre-1941 and Medal of Honor halcyon days, was the best military simulator on the market, and this Threadless shirt puts the game into a real-life context, placing the pegs in the bomb bay of a Japanese Zero. Not only that, Japan is clearly winning, which may be why the shirt has a distinct rising sun motif. It takes a true geek to turn pegs into propaganda.

17) TMNT: Turtle Power

Take popular 1980s cartoon slogan. Reinterpret it as a call to arms for disenfranchised amphibians. Await the revolution.

16) The Big Lebowski: Abide

Once considered cult, The Big Leboswki has become fairly ubiquitous, thanks to a toy line, regular Lebowskifests and the annual recruiting of new youths into the drinking and drug culture. So Supastarr’s shirt, which celebrates bowling and minding your own business (the two central tenets of Lebowskism) while eschewing a massive Dude or Walter head, is refreshingly geeky. There is another shirt out there with a massive John Turturro head on it, licking a bowling ball, but that’s not geeky—it’s just incredibly sexy.

15) Clerks: Berserker

Liking Kevin Smith is still geeky, right? Did Jersey Girl change that? Say what you will, but being able to quote Clerks verbatim, especially song lyrics sung by a Russian metalhead named Olaf, is geeky. Wearing a shirt with said song title on it, and a picture of a character who appeared on screen for approximately one and a half minutes and only appeared in one other movie ever, is geeky. Because the only people who know what the hell that’s about are huge geeks—specifically, Kevin Smith.

14) Indiana Pwns

Someday, there will be an Indiana Joes MMORPG. Picture an online world populated entirely by whip-carrying archaeologists, who traverse a digital globe, stealing artifacts from each other’s museums, killing Nazis and Indian cultists left and right. On that day, this pun will be a headline somewhere, but then, that’s the future, when everyone speaks in IMs. Until then, Busted Tees makes the list for mixing 1940s-style adventure with 2000s-style escapism, creating a joke shirt that is hysterical to the few, the proud, the geeks.

13) The Batmobile Lost a Wheel

Everyone knows the juvenile alternate lyrics to the already fairly juvenile “Jingle Bells,” wherein the Batmobile suddenly finds its tires decreased by 25% and the Joker makes a timely escape. But for an artist to take the time to illustrate a sad, detailed picture of that tragic winter’s night is the epitome of geekiness. To wear it is to say that you’re a fan of Batman OR a fan of nontraditional Christmas carols—either way, you subscribe to a newsletter, and are a geek.

12) Oregon Trail: Conservationist

You will notice that there are no Mario T-shirts on this list, mainly because Mario has crossed over into a mainstream realm where any jackass with access to a Nintendo (or memories of access to a Nintendo) owns a Mario shirt, and all of the other mushroom-eating jackasses laugh at it. This shirt not only celebrates the obscure Atari game Oregon Trail it makes a joke about the massive body count in the game, without even mentioning the game’s title. That shit is hard-effing-core. [Editor’s Note: Mario is still awesome.]

11) Joss Whedon is my Master Now

Assuming that the average person on the street knows who Joss Whedon is (and that may be assuming too much), it’s easy for them to translate this shirt’s message: you appreciate the work of Joss Whedon. But to truly grasp the meaning behind that statement, to parse the font and the language to recognize this shirt as a rejection of George Lucas and his Star Wars mythos…that takes a geek of a different color.