Frilly Shirt

FrillyShirt is a humour and commentary website with a Victorian Britain theme, dedicated to "historical facetiae and archaic nincompoopery" - in other words, to the sillier side of history. Created by Sir Frederick Chook, colonial fop, FrillyShirt has updated (sporadically) since 2005. As well as pieces of historical fiction or questionable advice columns, the site includes some arts and culture news from around Australia, as well as the occasional political rant or serious academic text. Two College Radio programmes were derived from FrillyShirt in the 2005-2006 period: Sir Frederick Chook's Highly Enjoyable Wireless Entertainment Hours and The Difference Hours.

Frilly Shirt provides examples of the following tropes:

• Alliteration: Very common.
• Antiquated Linguistics
• Big Screwed-Up Family: The Marigolds clan.
• The Chosen Zero: Burly-Man, a huge lunatic in a dress who is the inheritor of the ancestral powers of a line of warrior-heroines.
• Con Man: The FrillyShirt Personal Credit Cads. You can apply for one to swindle for you.
• Eagle Land: Mixed Flavour. Americans are generally wild, brash, uncultured and materialistic, but rarely actually villainous.
• Fake Band: Most prominently, The Three Swell Chaps, known for their single "Song about our Moustaches."
• Foreign Queasine: The Charing Cross Hotel Restaurant, which serves an experimental hybrid of French cuisine and heraldry.
• Genteel Interbellum Setting: Used for such stories as Clauses and Consequences with the Reverend Fenchtoast.
• High-Class Call Girl: The staff of Madam C's House of Pain - "You'll come for the pain, but you'll stay for the humiliation!"
• Inherently Funny Words: "Charlington."
• Invisibility: The Invisible Man's Dining Room & Cabaret Revue.
• Leave Behind a Pistol: A number of anagram-based alternatives to honourable suicide are proposed.
• Long List: Not infrequent, including Bucking & Cump, Picture Publishers.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Wilbur Partridges, who lives in the coal cellar.
• Metaphorgotten: Hegel's philosophy of history.
• Museum of the Strange and Unusual: The Labyrinth of the Society for Farcical Research.
• Occult Detective: Lucifer Marigolds, Esoteric Detective!
• Of Corset Hurts: Opposed by the Radical Dress Society in their pamphlet "Of Corsets Tight: A Cage to Bust."
• Parody Commercial: For such products as Willoughsby's Extra-Rigid Cigarillos, Uncle Chester's Flavourited Hair Paste, and Sir Frederick's own patented Leopard Oil.
• Punny Name: Lady Marjorie Butter-Tapenade. The Electro-Magnates. Winston Lewisham, Gentleman Thief.
• Snake Oil Salesman: Sir Frederick, whose Leopard Oil contains Zest, Hoop-Lah and Argh Crikey!
• Steampunk: Discussed, parodied and reconstructed.
• Wacky Races: The Annual International Mixed Doubles Quadricycle Race.
• Who's on First?: Who Is On First, A Music-Hall Farce.