And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

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"I killed a PC and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!"

Your parents went on their second honeymoon, your best friend went to Paris, or you survived the scariest haunted house in the world without needing to change your underwear afterwards.

And all you got was this lousy T-shirt.

Truth in Television. These T-shirts are everywhere.

A Sub-Trope of both Fun T-Shirt and And Your Reward Is Clothes.

I Added Examples Here And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt:

Comic Books

Fan Works

  • At the end of Drunkard's Walk II, Lisa gives Doug a T-shirt which reads, "I Went To Mega-Tokyo And Freed The Boomers And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt". Doug likes it so much that he has copies made of it to keep wearing for the next century and a half.
  • In the Sailor Moon fanfic Isekai by Moonlight, two of the Sailor Senshi and their boyfriends are sent to Another Dimension. When they finally figure out how to return, they bring back souvenirs; Minako gets a t-shirt that reads "my friends went to another world and all i [sic] got was this lousy t-shirt".

Literature

  • America (The Book) has a photo of a fake 1800 presidential campaign shirt that read "I endorsed the candidacy of Thomas Jefferson, for which I was inadequately compensated with this tunic of poor qualitie!"

Live-Action TV

  • On Sports Night, on the night of the NFL Draft, Dana gets T-shirts for the crew that say, "I survived Draft Day at Sports Night." When she insists on everyone wearing them now, Casey points out that draft day was just starting, and thus, they hadn't survived it yet.
  • Married... with Children: Marcy was so drunk when she married Jefferson her only clue to the fact she got married was the "lousy t-shirt" she got at the chapel.

Music

Newspaper Comics

Web Comics

  • In The Order of the Stick, members of the hobgoblin horde fighting The Battle of Azure City receive T-shirts saying "I killed a PC and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" upon "killing" the illusion forms of several members of the titular party.
    • And several strips later the goblins encounter Haley and Belkar, and say that maybe they handed out the T-shirts too soon.
  • In Dangerously Chloe Pandora during one of her covert visits to Heaven (for a change, not to meet her feathered sort-of-boyfriend) was wearing a white (of course) shirt with "Lo, I ascended into heaven and all I got is this lousy T-shirt" in a gothic font. Probably because the succubus in question is a compulsive prankster.

Western Animation