BellHaven NY (SATIRENEWSSERVICE) During today's earnings conference call, Tyranno Haberdashers, Inc., maker of the famous "Che" T-shirt, announced both its sixth consecutive quarter of record earnings and the creation of a new division.
"Our 'Che' T-Shirt has been so successful that we decided to create a division to develop additional, similar products," said an obviously happy Buffy Van Slant, President of Tyranno. "This division will extend the "Che" T-Shirt franchise by featuring the likenesses of other mass-murdering despots such as Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin. We figured that if a B-team mass-murderer like Che can sell millions of T-Shirts, who knows how many we'll sell when we start silk-screening the varsity."
"Dr. Hildegarde Steingehirn, Ph.D., Tyranno's Director of Psychological Profiling noted that the success of the Che T-Shirt had been accidental "but this new division will allow us to correct an embarrassing error in our analyses of our customers."
Van Slant agreed. "Our Che T-Shirt is an example of a classic market research failure that became a surprising business success.
"You see," said Steingehirn, "our research showed that Che was Cuba's first head of industrial production - and you know how that turned out. When Che and Fidel took over, Cubans had a higher GDP per capita and led better lives than most Western Europeans. Now they're barely above Haitians."
"Driving a successful, joyful country into ruins in less than a generation is an unbelievable feat and was achieved in part by changes in the economy that Che helped put into place," said Van Slant. "But of course Che accomplished a lot more than that. He also managed La Cabana prison when it was killing hundreds of peasants every month--usually in the middle of the night with a bullet to the head and often in front of the peasant's wife and children. The guy was brutal. We also read most of his writings and we gotta tell you, this guy had absolutely zero sense of humor. He was also a pretty lousy guerrilla fighter in Africa and South America."
"So," continued Steingehirn, "we originally marketed the shirt as satire - you know the freedom and joie de vivre represented by T-Shirts juxtaposed against the photo of a petty, failed, mass-murdering, humorless, bureaucratic prison guard. We thought it would be a real hoot.
"Our market research testing suggested that this shirt would appeal to a very small group of highly intelligent people who would have extremely well developed senses of irony and humor. Gosh were we ever wide of the mark!"
"It turns out we got it totally wrong and it turned out to be totally right! And that is the genius of capitalism!" chuckled Van Slant. "We've tested thousands of actual 'Che' T-shirt buyers and they have exactly the opposite characteristics of what we projected."
"Now we know that ironic humor and sophisticated intelligence are out, and pointless conformity and existential despondency and are in," said Steingehirn. "As you can imagine, the market for this demographic is huge, especially on elite campuses and in metrosexual cities! We figure to sell our Hitler shirts to vegans, our Pol Pot shirts to the anti-suburban sprawl crowd, and the Stalin shirts to the members of the Modern Language Association. Stalin was a linguist you know."
Asked if a Castro T-Shirt might be in the offing, Van Slant's reply was enthusiastic. "Oh yes, Fidel is definitely in Tyranno T-Shirt's future.
"We've got just the picture: his trimmed grey beard, his thinning hair, his mouth open having pontificated for hours on end to bored listeners. We've run numerous tests on the target demographic. I can't reveal our findings but I can give you a hint about the marketing - The Tenured Faculty magazine will be heavily involved."