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Start with the arch. GREETINGS curves over the top in blue-purple letters that look inflated, almost balloon-like, each one given a dimensional edge. Below the cat, HUZZ sits flat and short, four letters doing the work of a punchline. Between them: an orange tabby in a backwards red cap, a rainbow swirl lollipop held up in one paw, purple lightning cracking behind its head. The cat’s face is the whole argument. Deadpan. Unimpressed. The mouth is a straight line. The eyes give nothing back. That’s the design on the Greetings Huzz Funny Orange Cat Meme Internet Humor shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective, and it’s worth looking at closely because the…

Start with the board. In the artwork for the Got Too Silly Funny Bird Mugshot Prison Meme shirt, a white goose-like bird stands in an orange prison uniform, holding a black mugshot board. Above it, in plain caps: GOT TOO SILLY. The board is blank. That blankness is the whole joke, and it is also the whole drawing lesson. Mugshot iconography runs on the board. The board is where the name goes, the charge, the number, the date. It is the part of the photograph that turns a person into a record. Here the record is empty. The bird has been processed, dressed, posed, and yet there is nothing to…

A tank with arms Look at the body first. In Udo Keppler’s Next!, published in Puck, volume 56, number 1436, on September 7, 1904, the central figure is not a man. It is a Standard Oil tank—a squat, cylindrical storage vessel—given eyes, a beak, and a crown of writhing limbs. The Library of Congress catalogs the image under the title Next! and identifies it by the digital ID ppmsca.25884. The artist is Keppler (1872–1956), a staff cartoonist for Puck and the son of the magazine’s founding cartoonist, Joseph Keppler. The drawing is a diagram that has learned to menace. Tentacles wrap around the steel, copper, and shipping industries. Others coil…

The first thing I see is the gap. On a dark shirt, light lettering: a C on the left, a T on the right, and between them a cat silhouette. Below that row, the word Daddy. The cat is not beside the word. It is inside it—or rather, it is standing where a letter should be, and the eye completes the word around it. C-[cat]-T. The shirt is not saying “Cat Daddy” so much as it is spelling it with an animal. That is the whole design, and it is enough. The joke is not in a caption or a punchline. It is in the substitution. The cat is the…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. Start with the missing mark. On the shirt, the top line reads WAIT in white. No comma follows it. The bottom line reads I’M GOATED in white letters with a thick orange outline. Between them sits an orange cat in black sunglasses, the frames lowered just enough that both eyes remain visible above the lenses. That is the whole design. The argument is in what the absent punctuation does to the timing. A comma would make the sentence polite. Wait, I’m goated is a correction offered to someone who has misjudged you. It pauses, then explains. The shirt does…

Start with the shadow. On the cream ground of the shirt, a black wolf-shaped silhouette rises behind a small tan chihuahua. The dog is maybe a fifth the height of the shadow. It wears red boxing gloves. The shadow does not. The shadow is not a second dog, not a partner, not a threat from behind—it is the shape the chihuahua is casting, or the shape the chihuahua believes it is casting. The brick wall behind them both is the only thing in the image that doesn’t move. Above the dog, in cream lettering: I GOT THAT DOG. Below: IN ME. The phrase is split by the picture. That split…