The case for the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt holiday
“Humor is an essential fragment of the behavioral and emotional system that supports life.” — Voted on by Everyone
Last week, November 10 passed by without so much as a shout, or in this case, a howl.
Which is a pity, because November 10 needs to be an Internet holiday.
Why, you ask? Because on this day, the review for the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt was written… and it changed the Internet forever.
Changed the Internet you say? That sounds like hyperbole.
No. It’s really not.
Amazon as the biggest commercial marketplace on the Internet also happened to popularize an art phenomenon — a new way of telling a joke online — in its comment section. And the review that did this was the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt. On November 10th, 2008.
On that fateful November day, a user going by the name Brian Govern wrote a 300 word vignette about the Three Wolf Moon shirt — a dark teal t-shirt with three wolves howling at the moon. In his post, Govern describes how wearing this “magic” t-shirt in a Walmart immediately attracted women. It ends with his list of cons, his punchline:
“Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.”
Govern’s review sat unnoticed on the site for three months, until a popular bodybuilding forum stumbled upon it. And then it exploded. There’s even an official Star Wars version of the shirt.
Seven years later, and people are still into this t-shirt, still writing their own satirical reviews. A recent one tells prospective buyers that this shirt is too powerful for a mortal to “own,” rather, the wearer is simply a “caretaker” of the tee. Another, posted on November 15th, describes how he and a fellow Three Wolf Moon t-shirt wearer fell into a time loop due to the power emanating from both tees being in close proximity.
LifeHacker had a “t-shirt connoisseur” review the Three Wolf Moon shirt a few weeks ago. In 2015.
Somehow, Three Wolf Moon has managed to avoid the “dank meme” status that befalls Internet jokes years old and has became an accepted part of our cultural consciousness. This particular t-shirt shows up in video games, commercials and most recently, an episode of Mr. Robot(!).
But enough about the glory of this shirt and the joke that made it famous, how did it actually change the Internet forever?
Well, this shirt made mainstream the genre of customer review comedy, and inspired others to do the same on other products. Of which there are now hundreds, if not thousands. Blogger Maria Popova called these types of reviews in 2013 “modern masterpieces of comedic genius.” Even Amazon is proud of the funny reviews on its site.
<facepalm> Then there’s that white guy (“the master of the fake Amazon review”) who got famous in 2014 for his review about selling his child into slavery to afford a 40K television. His post ended up inspiring a bunch of people to also write about selling their family members into slavery. Ha ha, most hilarious, indeed. </facepalm>
To clarify, (again, for all you Internet types with poor reading comprehension skills), the Three Wolf Moon shirt review did NOT start this phenomenon, it only popularized it.
The Tuscan Whole Milk product was the first to see this sort of mischief… back in 2005. It began when one doctor wrote a one star review of Tuscan Whole Milk where he didn’t actually review the product in-so-much as scoff about the very idea of buying milk online when you could just go to a real life supermarket.
His review was quickly followed by comments mocking his incredulousness of online commerce, as well as a 5-star review written by an actual child proudly proclaiming that from now on, he would only buy milk online. Screw that old doctor dude hating new tech stuff, the kid probably thought. His review was joined by others vowing to buy milk online.
By the summer of 2006, the subversive web community of YTMND found the reviews, and flooded the section with their own absurd jokes and comments. People are still writing reviews about Tuscan Whole Milk to this day, in the form of poems, references to Tuscan raiders (from Star Wars), complaints about how it is “suspiciously white” and even one from last week written by someone pretending to be Putin.
Another popular product for review mischief is the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer, which clocks in at 5,300 reviews, more than the amount of reviews the Three Wolf Moon shirt (3,200) and Tuscan Whole Milk (1,800) has, combined. Despite its higher number, Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer hasn’t really spread beyond a certain type of Internet savvy user, as evidenced by the chart embedded below. (It is mentioned a lot in other joke Amazon reviews written by middle-aged men, for example.)
The Three Wolf Moon shirt, however, has a relatively unisex, friendly for all ages, blue class appeal that is both celebratory and satirical, making it well-known to the masses.
Google trends data places Three Wolf Moon as the most searched term of these three top joke reviewed products, which makes sense, because the product is not only physically tangible, it is wearable, and out in the wild of real life, so to say. The t-shirt is a bonafide pop-culture icon, an artifact from the Internet.
People see the shirt, they comment on it, the shirt wearer explains what it’s all about, and then the askee gets pulled into the joke, reads the reviews on Amazon, and many times, even buys the product and/or writes their own review, further perpetuating the humor. The New Hampshire Division of Economic Development made the Three Wolf Moon shirt their “official New Hampshire T-shirt of economic development” in 2010 because of its financial impact on The Mountain, the New Hampshire-based company that makes the t-shirt. In 2009, the Mountain was selling 100 Three Wolf Moon shirts an hour, proving that irony is, in fact, highly lucrative. Or that hipsters love spending their money on dumb shit. Either way, a success!
New York Times journalist Tom Zeller, writing about the satirical Tuscan Whole Milk reviews in 2006, explained these types of comments as a way to “subvert the spirit of customer reviews” and wondered if this is a reflection of our modern consumerist society. He doesn’t expand on these ideas, but it is easy to see the appeal of these reviews in this light, in particular the Three Wolf Moon shirt review.
We review everything online these days, from restaurants to clothes, professors and dentists. We do this because we’ve become more aware of our consumerist follies, and want to be as informed as possible before making a purchase. Increasingly, people rely on the online reviews to buy anything, even services.
Reviews have become the driver for buying anything online, way more than any other type of advertising, that Amazon now has to combat fake reviews written specifically to move product (and not for comedic effect). This review culture has contributed to some other darker trends too, like during public shaming times, where people negatively “review” a person online in order to punish them. One only has to look at what happened to the Yelp page of the dentist that killed Cecil the Lion to see this in effect.
The comedic Amazon review then, is as much of a reflection of our consumerist society as it is of our comment culture, where people are encouraged to express their opinions not just about products, but businesses, places, and even people. Purposefully writing a review to make the reader laugh, and not for its intended purpose of getting people to buy something, is a tiny act of defiance in a very First World Anarchist sort of sense.
Honoring the day that infamous Three Wolf Moon shirt was written is a way of celebrating not just the satirical review — a most benign form of trolling — and the arrival of the e-marketplace, but our entire digital way of life.
And why not celebrate that?
We already have three different holidays celebrating cats, including one that is just for watching cat videos online. Other internet holidays include Blog Like It’s The End Of The World Day, Talk Like A Pirate Day, and Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day and while these are all fine and dandy for funny holidays, neither of these is really about a change in online culture. (Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day, maybe, but don’t people already do this, year-round?)
If I’m going to celebrate the absurd, I also want to honor an art form that mandates absurdity. It’s very meta, I know.
As Megan Garber wrote in the Atlantic last year, these micro-holidays are as much PR stunts as they are “about finding communities of like minds within the social chaos of the Internet.” There’s been so much bad blood and toxic bipartisanship accumulating online lately, it’s important to remember that the social chaos of the Internet can be good too.
“We’re all writers, we’re all thinkers, we’re all storytellers” offered author Douglas Rushkoff in an ABC News report on the popularity of the tee. “And really, what we’re looking for are gathering places, places to share our humor and our imagination with each other.”
I’ll let these wolves play me out.
