Look at all the fun they're having! Surely they can't become the dinner of various vicious piranhas... Right?
A contest about who looks best in a Sexy Soaked Shirt. Played for Fanservice both In-Universe and out, or Played for Laughs when it goes wrong. Such contests are usually referred to rather than actually depicted.
Competitive Sub-Trope of Sexy Soaked Shirt. Compare Wet Sari Scene.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In the magazine New Horizons, a couple of space ship officers are absent. They're not watching a Wet T-Shirt Contest — they're judging it.
- One issue of She-Hulk showed what the title would be like if different artists were responsible for it. The Adam Hughes illustrated segment mentioned Black Widow and Scarlet Witch being undercover at a wet T-shirt contest.
Comic Strips
- In a Foxtrot arc where Jason and Marcus decided to have their own spring break beach vacation at home, the two of them decide to do one of these. As this is Jason and Marcus we're talking about, the contest involves soaking each other with water guns; the winner is determined by whose shirt gets less soaked.
Films — Live-Action
- In Deep in the Valley, the sorority sisters are having an impromptu wet T-shirt contest amongst themselves when Lester and Carl arrive at the sorority house.
- In Piranha 3D, one such contest is held with all the women participating wearing white T-shirts and swim bottoms. Of course, it's interrupted by some starving piranhas.
- Invoked in Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds In Paradise, the announcement of a wet T-shirt contest is used to clear out an arena full of fraternity brothers before Louis Skolnik, leader of the nerds' fraternity, can give a rebuttal to an unfair resolution proposed by the antagonist fraternity.
Literature
- This is used for an Pun (one of Piers Anthony's more wholesome Author Appeals) in the Xanth novel Up in a Heaval. A group of kids have a stock of Wetti shirts, which are perfectly normal t-shirts until worn, at which point they soak the wearer and become transparent. They decide they should have a contest, because that's what the shirts are for, but then some zombie girls wear them.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory: Penny has won several wet T-shirt contests she never even entered, or knew she'd entered. As she explained to Leonard Hofstadter, it was usually when she was drunk enough to have spilt a lot of drinks over herself.
- Joked about on Canada's Worst Driver. Sergeant Cam Wooley said "This is looking like a wet T-shirt contest!" Cut to an absolutely soaked Mike Butt: "I've never been on this side of a wet T-shirt contest!" This was during the Water Tank Challenge, and Mike Butt was doing as poorly as any of the contestants do (they invariably get drenched).
- Father Ted has an episode where Father Jack is shown to be dreaming of this one occasion where he was judging a wet T-shirt contest.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia had a wet T-shirt contest interrupted at the last second because one participant was underage.
- Parodied during a host segment in Mystery Science Theater 3000, when the 'bots hold one such contest... by soaking a pair of shirts in tubs of water. Crow claims victory because his shirt absorbed more water, though Servo counters that his soaked it up faster. They don't see what all the fuss is about.
- NCIS has some fun with it during the second season, when Tony discovers that prim-and-proper fellow agent Kate took part in and won such a contest in her youth. He won't let her live it down. When a picture of the contest is finally produced, it turns out to be Nipple and Dimed: it shows Kate having water poured over her while wearing a wet, white tank top, but the photo is cropped just above her breasts.
- RuPaul's Drag Race Season 4 has the queens donning huge fake breast plates and competing in a wet T-shirt contest. Weirdly, when the breast plates were not being worn, the nipples were not pixelated, but were pixelated during the contest.
- In a Season 2 episode of She Spies, D.D. takes part in a broadcast-safe version at Spring Break, which is basically a dry T-Shirt Contest.
Music
- Brad Paisley's song "Water" mentions one in one verse.
Daytona Beach on spring break
Eighteen girls up on stage
White T-shirts about to be sprayed with water - Frank Zappa's album Joe's Garage has a track titled "Wet T-Shirt Night", which tells about one such contest.
Video Games
- An interactive example in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, in which the protagonist wields the water gun.
- The third game in The Spellcasting Series has one, where the hero is tasked with recruiting girls to represent the Hu Delta Phart fraternity, and then magically cheating so that they beat the girls representing Getta Loada Yu.
Web Comics
- Chainsawsuit inverts this with a Wet Pants Contest
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- In Cinema Snob Reviews Frozen, Snob talks about Anna falling in the river, and that she could have entered a wet petticoat contest if her skirt wasn't turned to ice instead.
- Cross Time Café: During a spring break arc, Kathy shows up to a bikini contest in shorts and a T-shirt instead of a bikini. Tarin soaks her, leading to the judges cheering "Wet T-shirt!", and to her going berserk.
- El Goonish Shive has an Imagine Spot which contains a banner saying this in the "Night out" arc, when Ellen mentions to Nanase that her first choice of movie is a college party comedy.
- In this Nerf NOW!! strip, Morphling (a water elemental from Dota 2) protests being disqualified from one.
- From The Order of the Stick, Death is challenged to one
- In Unwinder's Tall Comics, Unwinder writes unsolicited TV ads for Taco Bell that paint the restaurant as some kind of hedonistic fantasy. This includes girls using the soda fountain for wet T-shirt contests.
Two young women walk up to the soda fountain at their local, ultra-hip Taco Bell. Both of them are wearing thin white fitted tee-shirts. Are they wearing bras? That depends on how relevant Taco Bell wants to be.
Web Original
- Homestar Runner: Parodied in the Strong Bad Email "bottom 10", where the first entry on Strong Bad's bottom 10 list is "Dry T-Shirt Contests": "You'll never find a more degrading contest or a larger waste of not-water."
Western Animation
- Family Guy: When Peter becomes smart after going to the smartest cities in the country, the family gets him back to normal by sending him to the dumbest city: Tucson, Arizona. When he comes back, Peter mentions that the city's philharmonic does wet T-short contests with chocolate milk.
- Parodied on Futurama, where one is held for robots. They all short out.
- In The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, Suzi X is briefly seen participating in a wet T-shirt contest.
- In King of the Hill, when Hank, his mother and her friends get caught in the middle of Spring Break, they come across one of these. When the announcer states they are going to spray several women wearing white Shirts with cold water, Hank states that's not a good idea as it will cause… then realizes the point of it.
