Against Black
Black underwear is the colour men buy when they do not want to choose. A warm argument for keeping two or three pairs and retiring the rest.
Against the Novelty Pair
The problem with novelty underwear is not that it is embarrassing. It is that the joke gets printed on the cheapest blank in the factory.
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There is a pair in your drawer with a reindeer on it. Possibly a chilli pepper, possibly a slogan on the waistband that was funny in the shop and has been silent ever since. Somebody gave it to you and you said thank you, and you meant it, and here it still is.
I am not going to tell you that you look foolish in it. That argument gets made constantly by people who think caring about underwear is itself a bit much, and it is the wrong argument anyway. The number of people qualified to have an opinion on your reindeer is very small and they have all decided in your favour already.
The objection is duller than that and much more serious. The novelty pair is, almost without exception, a bad garment. Not tasteless. Badly made. The joke and the cheapness travel together, for a reason that has nothing to do with humour and everything to do with how the thing gets made and sold.
Nobody inspects the cotton on a joke
Somebody has an idea for a print. The idea is the product. The garment is only the surface it gets applied to, and in the trade that surface is called a blank: a plain, finished, undecorated item bought by the box from whoever is cheapest that season. The person commissioning the print is not a garment buyer. They are a licensing person, or a gift-range person, and their attention is entirely on the artwork.
So the blank is chosen on cost, because the blank is the part nobody is buying.
That is the whole mechanism. In a serious underwear business the fabric is the decision, and somebody argues about yarn count, knit, finish, what the elastane does to recovery over a year. In a novelty business the fabric is a line on an invoice, and nobody argues because nobody in the room has that job.
You can feel it before you have worn the thing. Thin, papery jersey with a dry hand to it. Overlocked seams where a decent pair would have flatlocked. A gusset that is absent or perfunctory. Leg openings finished with a folded hem and a straight stitch that will roll on the thigh within an hour. Not corners cut maliciously. Just nobody paying attention Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
What a plastisol print does to a garment over a year
The print itself is not paint. It is, in most cases, a plastisol transfer or screen print: PVC particles suspended in plasticiser, laid on the surface of the fabric and cured with heat until they set into a plastic film sitting on top of the knit.
On top of. Not in the fibre. A sheet of plastic bonded to a stretchy substrate, and those two materials want completely different things.
Most people have already run the experiment without noticing the result. A fresh plastisol print is soft enough. Wash it a handful of times, particularly hot, and the hand of it changes. The area under the print stops behaving like fabric. It goes stiff and board-like, and it stops breathing entirely, because a plastic film is exactly as breathable as a plastic film. Keep going and it crazes, the fine webbing that comes before visible cracking, then flakes along the fold lines where the garment bends most.
The wash advice on the label is usually cold, inside out, no tumble drier, which is a quiet admission of the problem. Underwear is the one category where you sometimes actually want a hot wash, for reasons that are not aesthetic How to Wash Underwear Properly. Decoration that cannot survive the laundry the garment is meant to receive was designed for the shelf, not the drawer.
Water-based and discharge inks behave far better, because they dye the fibre rather than coating it, and a good printed pair from a real underwear maker will use one. Those cost more per unit, and unit cost is the only number anyone in this transaction was looking at The Fabric Bible: What Your Briefs Are Actually Made Of.
Printing a slogan on the one part that has to stretch
The waistband slogan is a genuinely strange piece of engineering.
The waistband is the hardest working component in the garment. It is under tension every second it is on your body, and it is asked to return to its original dimension thousands of times, for years. A good jacquard waistband weaves the letters into the elastic itself, out of the same yarns doing the stretching. They move together, which is why the logo on a well made waistband is still legible when the rest of the garment has given up.
A printed slogan is the opposite. A rigid film on the most mobile surface in the whole garment.
So it fails first, and visibly. The letters break up along the stretch axis, which is horizontal, which is precisely the direction they are written in. A slogan with gaps in it is worse than no slogan, because the eye still tries to read it.
Then the elastic follows. Not because the print killed it, but because the decision that got you a printed waistband also got you a cheap one: bare rubber or low grade covered elastic that loses recovery quickly, so within a year the band has grown, sits loose, and the garment hangs off you. The two failures are not cause and effect. They are siblings.
Looked at once, worn a hundred times
A novelty pair is designed for a single moment: the one where it comes out of the wrapping and somebody laughs. The box with the window, the fold, the print placement chosen to read well flat, all of it is optimised for that viewing. It is a card you can wear.
But it is not a card. It is underwear, worn against the skin all day, sweated into, sat on, walked in, then washed at high frequency for years. Measured in hours of service per pound spent, nothing else in the wardrobe comes close.
So the ratio is exactly the wrong way round. The garment is looked at once and worn a hundred times, and it has been built as though it were looked at a hundred times and worn once.
Nobody buys a boot for the way it photographs in the box. Underwear gets treated as the exception because it is unseen, and unseen has somehow been converted into not mattering.
Six joke pairs is six failures on an ordinary Tuesday
The real cost is not the money and it is not the print. It is occupancy.
A drawer holds a finite number of pairs and you cycle through them in rough rotation. If ten pairs are in service and six of them are jokes, then well over half your days start with a garment that was never designed to get you through a day. That is not hypothetical. It is a specific Tuesday in February, with a long meeting and a train and a walk from the station, and an afternoon spent vaguely uncomfortable and slightly damp across the front, and you never connect it to anything, because the garment is unseen and therefore never suspected The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
That is where novelty underwear does its damage. Not on the day it is funny, but on all the ordinary days afterwards, by occupying space a decent pair would have had. And the accumulation is relentless, because these are gifts, and gifts arrive whether or not you need them. Nobody ever gave a man a joke pair and then checked, a year later, whether he had run out of good ones.
The fix is not complicated. Retire them without ceremony and without guilt, and replace them with something you would choose for a Tuesday. A plain cotton rib in a colour you like does everything a joke pair does except the joke, and does it for years cotton rib brief.
What a joke pair says, gently
Now the harder part to say without sounding ungrateful, because the people who buy these are being kind.
Giving a man novelty underwear is almost always affection performed under time pressure. It is what you buy when you want to give somebody something, cannot think what, and the category presents itself as safely low stakes. The instinct is generous. The problem is what the choice quietly assumes.
It assumes that underwear is not a real purchase. That it is not a thing a man might have a view about, or a preference in, or a favourite maker for. That it belongs with the novelty mug: a token, not a garment.
That assumption is widespread and it is wrong, and correcting it is more or less the reason this site exists. Men do have preferences here. They have mostly just never been asked, and a culture that made it faintly embarrassing to care did the rest Why Men Are Frightened of Colour.
The better gift is not more expensive. It is just chosen. One pair of something genuinely good, plain, from a maker whose name means something, says the opposite thing: that the person receiving it wears clothes, and this is one of them Schiesser fine rib brief. It costs roughly what a boxed joke set costs, which rather undoes the argument for the joke set.
The counter-case, which is real
There are three good arguments on the other side and I concede all of them.
The first is wit itself. A well made garment with one small piece of humour on it has always been fine. A discreet motif, an unexpected lining, a printed inside waistband nobody else will ever read. The objection was never to amusement. It was to what the amusement was printed on.
The second is Christmas, which this site has already defended at length In Defence of Christmas Pants. The seasonal pack is a real tradition with real warmth in it, one of the very few rituals in which men receive clothing from people who love them, and being sniffy about that is a worse failing than owning a pair with a snowflake on. December pants are a rite, and rites are allowed to be silly. All I would ask is that the December pair be one pair, arriving once a year, rather than the foundation of the whole rotation.
The third is the plainest. A man who wants a lobster print is entitled to a lobster print. If the lobsters are dyed into good long staple cotton, on a well cut pattern, with a woven waistband and a proper gusset, then it is a good pair of underwear that happens to have lobsters on it, and I have no case against it at all printed cotton trunk. Whimsy is not the enemy of quality. It has just been kept in bad company.
Buy the wit second
So the verdict is narrower than the title suggests.
The problem is not the joke. The problem is the blank the joke is printed on.
Everything wrong with the novelty pair follows from the order of operations. The joke was chosen first and the garment was whatever arrived cheapest underneath it. Reverse that order and every objection here disappears. Choose the garment first, on fabric and cut and waistband and seam construction Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years. Then, if it happens to have a stripe or a motif or a small absurd animal on it, wonderful. Buy that one.
This does not require spending a lot. Some of the best value in the category sits at the sensible end of the high street, and a plain pair from a maker who knows what they are doing beats a boxed joke set on the measure nobody thinks to apply, which is how it feels in the second year of owning it The Best Cheap Underwear That Is Not a False Economy.
Keep the reindeer. Wear it once a year, in the right week, with the people who gave it to you in the next room.
Just do not build a drawer out of it.
Questions people ask
Is novelty underwear bad quality?
Usually, though not because of the print itself. Novelty ranges put artwork onto a cheap plain garment bought in bulk, and the people commissioning the artwork are not garment buyers, so fabric, cut, seams and waistband get chosen on cost alone. Expect thin jersey, overlocked seams, a weak waistband and no proper gusset. A printed pair from an actual underwear maker is a different proposition, because there the garment was designed first and decorated second merino boxer brief.
Why does the print on underwear crack after washing?
Because most of it is plastisol, a plastic film cured onto the surface of the fabric rather than dyed into the fibre. Plastic does not stretch and recover the way a knit does, so every wash and every wear works the two materials against each other. The print stiffens first, then crazes into fine webbing, then flakes along the fold lines. Water-based and discharge inks dye the fibre instead and survive far better, which is why good printed underwear feels like fabric everywhere, including under the design.
Are printed waistband slogans a bad idea?
Yes, on engineering grounds. The waistband is under constant tension, so a rigid printed film sits on the least suitable surface in the garment and breaks up along the horizontal stretch axis, which is the direction the words run. Good waistbands weave the lettering into the elastic as jacquard, so branding and stretch are the same yarns and move together. A printed rather than woven logo is a reliable signal about the rest of the garment.
What should I buy a man instead of joke underwear?
One good pair rather than a boxed set of jokes, in a plain colour, from a maker with a real reputation for underwear. It costs roughly the same and says something quite different: that his clothes were worth thinking about. If you do not know his size, a decent pair of wool socks carries no sizing risk and gets worn constantly. Keep the seasonal joke pair as the extra, not the main present, and it stays a tradition rather than becoming his drawer.