I found myself with no good ideas of what I wanted this month’s post to focus on. To be honest this pandemic fatigue has left me foggy brained and drained. But a re-watch of 30 Rock (which hasn’t aged the best let me tell you) provided me with a bit of inspiration.

The punchline of a joke is “They’re Dickies!” And it’s funny, because dickies are funny. But then I thought to myself, “Why are they funny?” “What’s the history of them?”

Well I suppose putting my comedy monocle on it’s the fact that it’s an illusion and it’s a funny thing to think that you’re walking around in half a shirt and no one knows.

But as it turns out the history is a bit more pragmatic that you might think.

The entomology of the word “Dickie” comes from cockney rhyming slang. There is mention of a “dickey dirt” in conjunction of a shirt. In short, a dickey was used in a lot of working class professions as it was a lot easier to launder than a full shirt. You could also turn it inside out more easily than a full shirt to give it a second life. It was especially popular in the 1850s.

Historically there are a few types of dickies:

• Hard plastic (or celluloid) dickies: If you’ve ever seen an old vaudeville sketch or a Buggs Bunny cartoon where the bib or dickie keeps riding up this is where that comes from
• Cardboard dickies: Were used by a lot of theatre and service professionals to help save on laundering bills.
• Cloth dickies: The only type still made. Can be collared or turtleneck. They’ve had a resurgence a bunch of times most recently in 2015 Michael Kors 2015 resort ware collection

So when you really look back it’s a bit of a classist move to hate on dickies as they really enabled hard working people to do their job and save a little bit of money to give to their family. So I’ll stop hating on them now.