I have a thing about people who wear sweaters that tell a story. You know, like those overly-detailed Christmas sweaters, many travel sweatshirts, things like that. When I was in third grade I had a sweater with an image of a house and an actual plush Santa doll hanging off the chimney. Unfortunately, the chimney was placed right over my just-developing left boob, drawing attention (at least in my paranoid mind) to the mortifying changes going on south of my neck. What girl would want Santa hanging off her boob? This left some emotional scarring, resulting in an instant hatred of anyone wearing tacky clothing bearing images. Cheesy animals are no exception.

Luckily the reviewers at Amazon.com are more jovial than my bitterly sardonic sense of humor – though they clearly share my lack of appreciation for ugly-ass, why-the-hell-are-you-wearing-that-you-cliché-soccer-mom type clothing. And their reviews have pushed one of those cheesy-ass wolf t-shirts to the top of Amazon’s sales charts.

Can a T-shirt go viral online? Well… of course it can.

There’s an informal comedy-writing workshop of sorts going on over at Amazon, where a growing wave of reviewers have latched on to a T-shirt bearing the image of a trio of wolves howling at the moon.

Snarky reviewers at the site are giving the T-shirt credit for everything from psychedelic vision quests to new and intense attention from the opposite sex. Some of the tales are quite elaborate.

“I have been wearing this shirt for about 15 weeks and I have not needed to wash it!” claim’s one Amazon shopper’s review. “You don’t put this shirt on your torso you put it on your soul.”

“Rex Creekmur” of Washington, DC, puts a J.J. Abrams-style twist on his review. “If you inadvertently put this shirt on backwards AND inside out, you will cause a tear in the actual fabric of space-time,” he warns.

Another reviewer makes a veiled reference to a previous product that somehow became the butt of a viral wave of joke reviews: “I accidentally spilled a glass of Tuscan Whole Milk down the front of this shirt, and my soul was torn from my body and thrown into heaven by a jealous God.”

So far the T-shirt has earned 158 5-star reviews, climbed to the top of Digg, and is now riding high as the number-one item in Amazon’s apparel store.

That’s right. People are not just reviewing the three wolves T-shirt — they’re buying.

“It’s nice to see our shirt at number one at Amazon,” Michael McGloin, one of the partners at The Mountain, the New Hampshire-based company that makes the shirt. “We’re of course, okay with publicity… [and] it’s hilarious that you can comment on an Amazon product and push it to number one.”

[From the Washington Post]

All of these reviews could also apply to any of those pathetic unicorn t-shirts or anything with a kitten. But I’ve got to say, I’m really glad Amazon’s reviews are getting more humorous and less useful. Actually I’ve rarely found them to be useful, so they might as well be funny. The only thing that isn’t hysterical about this story is the result: people are actually buying this shirt. And I really don’t think it’s possible to wear it ironically – at least in a way where other people can tell that’s what you’re doing. Which means I’m going to have to go around town, ripping this ugly-ass shirt off people. Thus tearing the fabric of space-time.