Songfacts®:

• The Royal Teens were a teenage quartet from New Jersey who fell into the New York City songmaking scene after playing various battle of the bands competitions. A producer named Leo Rogers had them play background for various acts and released their first single, "Short Shorts," on his Power Records label. The song took off, and the group got a distribution deal with ABC Paramount to meet demand. The group went on tour and had two more hits: "Harvey's Got A Girl Friend" (#78, 1958) and "Believe Me" (#26, 1959). They broke up before releasing an album, but "Short Shorts" was a sensation, earning the group appearances on most of the big music shows in America, including the Saturday Night Beechnut Show and American Bandstand.
• Unlike the miniskirt, there was no fashion trend related to short shorts - it was a title members Bob Gaudio and Tom Austin came up with. On the Royal Teens website, it tells the possibly apocryphal story that Gaudio and Austin had the music written for the song and were driving around trying to think of what to call it when they spotted two girls wearing short cutoff jeans (later known as Daisy Dukes), which provided inspiration for the title.
• Lyrically, there's not much to this song: just this stanza repeated three times:
  
  Who wears short shorts
  We wear short shorts
  They're such short shorts
  We like short shorts
  Who wears short shorts
  We wear short shorts
  
  It can certainly fall into the bubblegum category based on the words, but musically the song is more than kids stuff, with two mighty saxophone solos and guitar break separating the choruses.
• This was the first hit song written by Bob Gaudio, who was 15 years old at the time. The piano player in the group, he would form The Four Seasons a few years later and become not just their keyboard player and tenor vocalist, but also a main songwriter for the group, with a hand in writing their smash hits "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like A Man," "Rag Doll," and many others. He also spearheaded the Jersey Boys Broadway production, which tells the story of The Four Seasons.
  
  Gaudio came from a classical jazz background - this song was his crossover to rock.
• In the late '70s, this song was revived when it was used in a long-running campaign for Nair hair-removal products (see an example here). This was before DVRs (or even VCRs), so many viewers actually watched the commercials, especially if they had a catchy tune. The song became ubiquitous as a result of the ads, which ran well into the '80s. Many younger viewers had no idea the song dated back to the '50s.
• Besides Gaudio, there was another famous Royal Teen: Al Kooper, who relates in his autobiography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards that the Royal Teens were the first real band he'd hooked up with... also at age 14.
  
  Kooper, who played guitar in the band when they went on tour, heard the call to rock 'n' roll early, but his parents disapproved. So for a few years in his teens, Kooper led a double life, keeping his stage clothes in a friend's garage and slipping out for gigs on the sly. At one gig with The Royal Teens (this was well after their rise to fame with "Short Shorts"), he found himself stranded in Manhattan at 5:30 AM without a ride back to his home in Queens. He had to call his parents, who paid for a cab ride home. Kooper relates in his book: "Passing my father on the front walk, he on his way to work, me just returning from mine. And that look on his face as he hurried past me, as if an inner voice was telling him, 'Your son has been lobotomized by Martians carrying electric guitars. He'll never be the same again.' It would have made a perfect portrait.
• On pressings of the single, only piano player Bob Gaudio and drummer Tom Austin are credited as songwriters, but the official credits also list original members Billy Dalton (guitar) and Billy Crandall (saxophone) as composers.
• "Short Shorts" reached its chart peak in February 1958. Four months later, the #1 song in America was Sheb Wooley's novelty smash "The Purple People Eater," which includes a nod to the Royal Teens hit in the lyric, which mentions that the purple monster "wears short shorts." (And on the cover art, indeed he is.)
• This is the theme song to a late-night Japanese TV series called Tamori Club.