The Lowdown

This ain’t your pappy’s how to iron a shirt video. Read on for a description of the film that took the shirt ironing world by storm.

Introduction

Since time immemorial, man has struggled against all odds to comprehend the myriad complexities involved in the process of shirt ironing. The question plagued Aristotle, Plato, and other great thinkers of antiquity who first tackled the ironing problem after getting their togas all wrinkly during some seriously wild nights of debauched revelry. Although their great works on the subject no longer exist, having been lost in the burning of the library at Alexandria, many references to their brave journeys into the philosophy of ironing can be found in various plays and poems of the time.

During the intervening two-thousand years, little progress has been made toward their goal of ironing-comprehension, and many great men have been dethroned - strong countries toppled - because of a sloppy un-ironed garment that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

History tells us that Amerigo Vespucci, the man after whom the Americas were named, died from exposure to the elements, but is that truly the case? Did Vespucci really die because of widespread exposure to disease and a lack of modern medicine?

Or did he, as some scholars are starting to believe, simply have a critically wrinkled shirt?

You be the judge.

Clearly, the world can afford no more casualties of iron ignorance, and here to bring us out of the dark ages of ironing, the incredible “How To Iron a Shirt Video,” available at Handango, is the thunder and lightning, no holds barred, hang-on-to-your-balls-for-dear-life look at shirt hand-ironing technique for which the world has been anxiously waiting.

Safety First

Shirt ironing has remained shrouded in mystery for many reasons, not the least of which is the inherent danger associated with the activity. It is for this reason that such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci never attempted ironing themselves, but delegated the task of operating their massive ironing machines to illiterate country bumpkins who would not be missed when things went haywire.

In these modern times, although advances in the sciences have enabled Nobel Prize winning minds to decrease the size of ironing apparati many times over, the process itself is still fraught with danger.

Thankfully, the inherent peril of ironing wasn’t lost on the producers of How To Iron a Shirt, and at the beginning of the five minute video, we are presented with a message which adequately warns any would-be ironers that some clothing might be better left wrinkled:

The message couldn’t be clearer: Do not try to iron your shirt after watching this video. Rather, do yourself a favor and track down someone else who can help you take your first few steps.

It just so happens that while researching the art of ironing for this review, I stumbled across a few references in an ancient Vedic text to a group which, translated from the original Sanskrit, is known to us as The Illuminati. Within their ranks, or so reported my source, exist the members of an ironing guild which has for eons been guarding the secrets of the craft from falling into the wrong hands.

They meet once every hundred years in the central senatorial hall of the lost city of Atlantis. They come representing every nation in the world, riding flying unicorns on beams of pure energy into the place of assembly.

More than this, I cannot say, but consider yourself warned: Don’t be a fool. Before you pick up that iron, contact me, and I will help you determine when the next meeting of the Ironing Guild will take place (I alone possess the knowledge to decipher their strange calendar, based on the movements of Jupiter’s four most prominent moons and their alignment with the magnetic polarization of the Astral Rune Key – attempting to acquire the date on your own using the Gregorian calendar, or a lunar-based approach, could lead to disappointment at best, and the demolecularization of the entire universe at worst (what I’m trying to say is: imagine an alternate reality brought about by your fiddling in which Rod Stewart is the President of the World – if you don’t like the sound of that, then take my advice)).

The Ironing Itself

Given the dangers of ironing, the best approach might be to avoid the entire experience yourself and simply watch someone else perform the act. Why take unnecessary risk when someone else can cross that line for you?

In this respect, How To Iron a Shirt Video doesn’t let us down. After one minute of introductory warnings and other assorted preamble, the star of the film gets right down to ironing a shirt, and, boy – does she ever iron that bastard.

You might as well forget everything you thought you knew about ironing. I majored in Post-Modern Iron Theory at Cambridge, and I can tell you that, in my twelve years of exploring the discipline, I never came across ironing like this. What we were taught back there in academia was all theory based (real ironing being too expensive and dangerous for a student to perform), but the ironing maven in How To Iron a Shirt Video seems to have developed her own style, probably honed over years and years of ironing in the hard streets of life.

She’s fast, too. Although I’ve never tried to iron anything myself, preferring the safety of study to the real thing, I’ve spoken with a few people who have managed to iron something, and not one among them could have come close to the level of performance I saw in this video. Honestly, I’m wondering if there wasn’t some kind of film witchery here, doctoring the video to make it appear as though it only took four minutes to iron the shirt, but damned if I can’t find a single edit point that might betray their magic.

In the fifth year of my post-doctoral research, I had the honor of meeting one of the world’s greatest ironers. He kept himself safely hidden away in a cave on Mount Ararat where he spent his life engaged in iron meditation, and I stayed with him during the seventeen days he required to prepare and perform the ironing of a single sock.

The extreme-ironing exhibited in this video is a wake-up call for which I’m not convinced the world is ready.

Imperfection

Speed isn’t everything in ironing. Although my iron monk friend took seventeen days to iron one sock, that sock came out the other end of the process with only a vague hint of a third dimension. It was as flat as a sock could have been without ceasing to exist in our physical reality. I actually watched as he shaved with one of its edges.

I felt rather let down, then, when I watched as the protagonist of the ironing film took the recently ironed shirt and simply tossed it over her ironing board, bunching it up and probably wrinkling it all over again:

Evidently, every ironer has a blind spot. Some are great at collars while others know sleeves. This one knew it all – except for this one unfortunate slip-up at the end.

However, if you can ignore this transgression against the code of ironing, then the video still has much to offer in its first four minutes.

Who This Movie is For

It’s for you, you bloody slob.

Rating

I give this film a rating of ((492.6a + Yellow) * pi).