South Fellini has always wanted to let you in on the joke. Now they have a podcast to help you along.

If you’re new to Philadelphia, the first time you walk into the South Fellini T-shirt shop on Passyunk Avenue, might leave you confused by what’s on offer.

What is “jawn,” and why is it emblazoned on a hoodie, stylized like the logo of the local gas station?

Why are Phillies fans climbing greased poles on Broad Street, anyway — and why is there a T-shirt here endorsing the practice?

But the thing about the guys from South Fellini is they’ve always wanted to let you in on the joke.

Johnny Zito, 40, and Tony Trov, 39, founders of the now wildly successful Philly lifestyle brand, aren’t here to gatekeep. They may be South Philly lifers. But they want you to become one, too. Think of them as the nice old heads from down the block.

“We tell people the inside scoop,” Trov said with a laugh during a recent interview at the shop, which officially fully reopened Oct. 22 after a two-year pandemic hiatus. “We tell people the secrets.”

They want you to ask questions, dig into everything that makes Philadelphia weird and wonderful and exciting — and become just as obsessed with it as they are.

Of course, for locals like Zito and Trov, who grew up blocks from the avenue, in the changing South Philly of the 1980s and ‘90s, the in-jokes on the T-shirts signal a special kind of understanding, one that goes beyond writing “cheesesteak” on a hoodie and calling it a day.

South Fellini T-shirts will reference Toynbee Tiles — the mysterious messages embedded in the streets throughout the Philly region. Or the ubiquitous mid-century doors with windows patterned in keyhole, starburst, and diamond shapes on rowhouses in the neighborhood.

It’s the specificity of their designs that sets South Fellini apart.

And since opening in 2016, South Fellini designs have exploded far beyond Passyunk Avenue. From Bryce Harper to Adam Sandler to countless, anonymous South Philadelphians in the sushi section at the Reed Street Acme, it can sometimes feel like most everyone here has a South Fellini shirt in the closet. Or a “Jabroni” hat on their head.

If the clever T-shirts were a way to get newcomers in on the joke, the shop’s podcast, Legends of Philadelphia, launched during the doldrums of the pandemic, is a way to explain all those esoteric references in full.

Though they run a business based on nostalgia and laughs, Zito and Trov, both Temple film school grads and filmmakers and writers, aren’t trying to mythologize a Philadelphia past that doesn’t exist — but to examine it, warts and all.

It’s what came naturally to them, starting out in the mid-2000s, hawking designs to South Street T-shirt shops and hustling enamel pins to Facebook friends at the Singing Fountain on Passyunk Avenue.

Philly was on the verge then, soon to be suddenly interesting to the rest of the country, with the Phillies and Eagles winning championships, a pope in town, and a fresh gleam attracting transplants.

And by now Zito and Trov, whose childhood friendship began as two artsy outsiders in a South Philly with few of them, had Philly-shaped chips on their shoulders. At film school, classmates called them “South Fellini” as a playful insult, and industry bigwigs looked past the Philly scene, even as the pair’s comic books and horror films found niche success.

The T-shirts and pins were a side gig. But soon they realized how much their designs resonated with the people who bought them. They couldn’t shake their South Philly roots — and they didn’t want to. So they embraced them.

“We wanted to show people how cool we thought Philly was — and why we stuck around,” Zito said.

They moved past weird takes on the Phillies and the Eagles and Rocky to evermore specific cultural delights, like the shirts advertising a fictional Fishtown Yacht Club or exhorting visitors to the “South Philly Pines” (notoriously overgrown FDR Park).

“There is an inherent irony — we knew old Philadelphia needed a lot of improvement,” said Zito. They remember when FDR Park was a place for South Philly kids to shoot off illegal fireworks, and Passyunk Avenue was still populated by tough guys in Members Only jackets, when the stores were closing, the trash collectors were striking, and all the teams were losing.

“When people say I miss old Philadelphia, they’re remembering something that didn’t really quite exist ... The idea of celebrating this was a lot of fun.”

Soon, the T-shirt printers couldn’t keep up. And in 2019, Trov’s phone rang at happy hour: Bryce Harper, newly signed to the Phillies, wanted a South Fellini shirt to wear to his first season opener in his new city.

It was a changing city, and they were doing their best to change with it, including in 2019 when they pulled T-shirts of the East Passyunk logo — which featured a drawing of an Indigenous person wearing a Western headdress.

By 2020, there was a new shop at the Fashion District, 14 employees, a warehouse, and an expanded line of T-shirts, pins, hats, hoodies, onesies, and various other odds and ends.

The pandemic ground it all to a halt. The gallery shop closed, never to reopen. Down to one employee, and no longer folding T-shirts all day, they took the opportunity to think more deeply about why their silly T-shirts were connecting.

And now as the South Philly shop hums back to life, and with new designs for the Phillies World Series run, they’re still as irreverent as ever. After much soul-searching, they’ve branded their aesthetic “Hoagiewave,” a Philly take on the ‘80s-inspired vaporwave music genre.

And they started the podcast with producer Bryan Bierman, a Philly writer and comedian with a particular skill for one-liners and a Philly accent for the ages.

“They were pointing out things from Philly that I looked at my whole life and never thought of as a Philly thing,” he said.

Each episode begins with a thrumming electronic drum beat — Trov is a musician who helmed a Beatles cover band in high school called “I Buried Paul” — and a gag about those questions newcomers still ask them.

“Do long hots prevent scurvy?”

“Has anyone ever triple-parked before?”

“Why is the Philly accent such a natural aphrodisiac?”

As funny as the episodes are — there’s a 10-hour arc on the Rocky movies and an episode devoted to Jim Gardner’s mustache — they’re far more thoughtful than you’d think from a podcast by a T-shirt shop. They’ve covered everything from the history of Moyamensing Prison to Allen Iverson’s sneakers to the myriad of funeral parlors on South Broad Street. There’s an episode on Byberry State Hospital and the racial history of South Street. And like their T-shirts, it’s all infused with a deep respect and curiosity for their city.

“We’re two guys from South Philly who wanted to make it at our jobs, and the city was nice enough to make that happen,” Zito said. “And every day we can make the city a little cooler and boast about it to the rest of the world is us paying back our debt.”