Growing Old Disgracefully: Why Cheeky Greeting Cards Are Booming Amongst Older Shoppers

BY Michael Constantine

There's a persistent myth that irreverence is a young person's game — that anyone over sixty wants a card with a watercolour bluebird and a Hallmark-approved platitude about "Another year of blessings."

Walk into any card shop today, as I did recently in search of a birthday card for an old friend turning 65 - and you'll find the opposite is true. The fastest-growing fans of rude, ridiculous, gleefully humorous and borderline inappropriate cards aren't twenty-somethings. They're often grandparents.

Part of this stems from a demographic misunderstanding: older consumers didn't stop having a sense of humour when they got their Senior Rail pass.

If anything, they've earned the right to stop pretending.

Decades of surviving mortgages, teenagers, and the occasional disastrous haircut tend to sand the politeness off a person. A card that jokes about incontinence, forgetfulness, or the slow creep of gravity doesn't feel cruel to someone who's lived it — it feels like being let in on the joke rather than having it made at their expense.

There's also a generational shift in what "appropriate" even means. The cohort now turning 65 came of age with Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Punk Rock, and sitcoms like ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ that famously skewered authority for fun.

They were never the buttoned-up generation nostalgia paints them as. A card that says "Happy Birthday, you fossil" isn't an affront to their dignity — it's their native tongue.

Retailers have caught on, and the numbers back them up: cheeky and comedic cards now represent a substantial and growing slice of the birthday and retirement card market, with older buyers driving much of that growth rather than merely tolerating it.

Card companies have responded with entire lines built around aging jokes — bad knees, worse memory, prescription bottles rattling like maracas, out-of-hours alcohol indulgence — sold not despite the intended recipient being older, but because of it.

There's something almost tender under the crude jokes, too. A cheeky card requires a kind of intimacy; you don't send "You're not old, you're vintage" to a stranger. It's an inside joke wearing a birthday card's clothes, a way of saying I know you well enough to mock you affectionately, and you'll love it.

In a culture often accused of making older people invisible or infantilising them with soft-focus sentimentality, a well-timed dirty joke on cardstock might be one of the more respectful things you can send someone turning sixty-five...

Aging, it turns out, isn't the joke. Pretending it sometimes can’t be funny, is.

Michael Constantine is Co-founder and Chairman of A3A