Maturity: The candidate is not a kid, or otherwise handicapped.
Nobody laughs when a child dies. Anyone below the age of sixteen does not qualify. A child does not possess sufficient maturity and experience to make life-or-death decisions, and the responsibility for her safety still resides with her guardians. Similarly, the death of a person with physical or mental handicaps is not amusing if it results from an innate impediment, rather than a poor decision. Those who lack maturity are not eligible for an Award.
Veracity: The event is true.
If it happened to you, you know it’s true. Otherwise, rely on reputable newspapers (not Weekly Whirled News) or other published articles, confirmed television reports, and so forth. Responsible eyewitnesses are also valid sources, particularly if there are several independent confirmations. Be warned, though! What your brother says is probably true. What your brother said his friend’s boss said is not reliable! Nor is a chain e-mail or a doctored photograph. The use of your own “bullshit radar” is highly recommended. It’s probably more accurate than you realize. Also a quick reality check with www.Snopes.com can sort the wheat from the chaff, the legend from the likely.
FAQ: I already have kids. Am I safe?
Yes. You passed your genes along. You’re safe!
The broader question is whether a person with offspring can win a Darwin Award. Our community engages in interminable and ultimately inconclusive discussions about what it means to be out of the gene pool. What if the winner has already reproduced? What if the nominee has an identical twin? Old people aren’t going to have any (more) kids—are old people disqualified? What about cryogenics: frozen sperm and eggs? If cloning humans becomes possible, will Darwin Awards cease to exist?
And the answer is…I don’t know. These questions are vexing. But if you no longer have the physical wherewithal to breed with a mate on a desert island, you are eligible for a Darwin Award.
FAQ: Sometimes the winners are still alive?!
True. Some aren’t dead. Some are sterile! Men who carry a loaded gun in the waistband of their trousers, men who survive an amorous encounter with a vacuum cleaner or porcupine—a few lucky “winners” are out of the gene pool, yet still alive to collect their Awards in person.
Also you will read another type of story in the book. Darwin Award winners are (whistle) out of the gene pool. But the At Risk Survivors engineer incidents that are not quite fatal—through no fault of the perpetrator! They illustrate the spirit of a Darwin Award candidate. Be careful not to stand too close to an At Risk Survivor!
FAQ: How do you confirm the stories?
The words Confirmed True by Darwin indicate that a story is backed up by reputable media sources, or multiple eyewitness accounts. Usually I have read the news report with my own eyes. You can check up on the veracity yourself. Find the story on the Darwin Awards website: Newer stories have a link to media references and the original submission. Search the Slush Pile and the Reject Heap for confirmation. If all else fails, search Google.
www.DarwinAwards.com/book/search.html
All the Darwin Awards and At Risk Survivor stories are believed to be true. None set off my sensitive “Bogus Detector,” but sometimes sufficient supporting documentation is lacking. Instead of tossing out a perfectly good escapade, I label these “Unconfirmed.” Many a time a reader will e-mail me the confirmation I need. If you know an “Unconfirmed” story is true (or false), please contact me!
www.DarwinAwards.com/book/contact.html
When reading the stories, be aware that I do change names and obscure details in the At Risk Survivor stories, in order to provide a measure of anonymity for the innocent—and, for that matter, the guilty. This is to satisfy the legal beagles. Aww, puppies are so cute.
FAQ: Have you ever been wrong?
Once or twice a day! Sometimes I’ve been spectacularly wrong. The guy who wanted to see what it felt like to be shot with cigarette butts, and was killed by three butts to the heart? I was fooled by bogus media references! It’s a hoax, a legend, completely fabricated. It took a MythBusters researcher’s inquiry for me to realize that I’d been duped! The “urban legend” about the woman who submerged in the ocean to pleasure her man? Oops! Turns out it really happened. The books capture the stories to the best of my current knowledge. The latest scoop is on the continually updated Darwin Awards website.
FAQ: Where do you get your stories?
From you! So keep a sharp lookout in your neighborhood.
Every Darwin Award begins its life as a submission to www.DarwinAwards.com. Nominations come from around the world. Volunteer moderators review the submissions while chanting, “Death. Excellence. Self-selection. Maturity. Veracity.” Is it a potential Darwin Award? Is it an At Risk/Near Miss? The best submissions are promoted to the Slush Pile:
www.DarwinAwards.com/slush
Readers rate the Slush Pile stories on a scale from 0 to 10, and I review the Slush Pile stories with the highest vote. Five to ten stories per month strike me as ludicrous enough to be a Darwin Award. I refer to the rules, moderator comments, and my own intuition when deciding whether a story makes the cut. I rewrite the dry news reports as amusing one-page vignettes, and they go into the permanent archive.
But that’s not the end of the process! It’s a new beginning. The Darwin Awards website has a vast audience. Approximately one million (1,000,000) visitors read ten million (10,000,000) stories each month. Believe you me, I hear about mistakes. Readers send corrections and confirmations and snarky comments about typos. The Darwin Awards stories are continually updated, and sometimes disqualified, based on community comments.
The stories in this book have been scrutinized, and they are accurate to the best of our knowledge. But due to the dynamic process described above, they are not guaranteed to be entirely accurate. They are a snapshot of the state of human evolution at the time of this writing. As you read the tales contained herein, keep in mind the care with which each gem was culled from dozens of competitors and honed to its current form.
Your vote counts! Visit us at:
www.DarwinAwards.com/slush
FAQ: How many submissions do you get?
Monthly Submissions and Slush Pile Stories
We get two hundred to four hundred submissions per month. About forty go into the Slush Pile, and I pick fewer than ten per month to write into vignettes for the archive.
A particularly sensational story is often submitted hundreds of times. The most recent avalanche was in April 2008: A priest went aloft in a lawn chair tethered to hundreds of helium-filled balloons, à la Lawn Chair Larry. He has not been seen since. As the joke goes, he “ascended to heaven.”
Another popular incident happened in May 2005. Two Star Wars acolytes constructed realistic “lightsabers” by filling fluorescent tubes with gasoline and lighting them. They survived through no fault of their own!
FAQ: What is the History of the Darwin Awards?
The origin of the first Darwin Award is obscure.
Did the collective processing power of connected computers that formed the early Internet give rise to an electronic consciousness, and were the Darwin Awards this artificial life-form’s first attempt at humor? Less fanciful information recently came to light.
Google’s Usenet archive contains the oldest known citation, an August 1985 mention of the fellow who crushed himself beneath a Coke machine while trying to shake loose a free can—a true story! The second mention, five years later, is the man who strapped a JATO rocket onto his Chevy. The JATO Rocket Car is the most popular Darwin Award of all time—although it is an Urban Legend. The author of that Usenet posting was Paul Vixie.
Greg Lindahl said, “Everybody knows who Paul Vixie is; he maintains BIND, which holds the Internet together.” Greg e-mailed Paul, and Paul, a consummate packrat, produced a 1991 e-mail from Charles Haynes. Charles said that he had heard the term from Bob Ayers: “We sit around talking about Darwin Awards after a hard day’s rock climbing. I wonder wh
y….”
My involvement with the Darwin Awards began in 1993. The tongue-in-cheek poke at human evolution tickled my scientific funny bone. I wanted more! Sadly, I could only find five, and tracing the Darwin Awards to their lair proved fruitless. So I began writing new vignettes for my website. I sent out newsletters, encouraged submissions, discussions, and voting. My hobby became a consuming passion. I assumed the alter ego “Darwin” and debated philosophy with readers. These conversations led to the refinement of the concept of a Darwin Award.
I let the Darwin Awards grow under the guidance of my audience. I pruned stories when they told me my judgment was flawed; for instance, if the deceased was the victim of a bizarre accident rather than his own poor judgment. We argued fine points such as whether offspring or advanced age rule out a candidate. And through the years I protected my audience from submissions that would make a hardened criminal cringe.
I said “No!” to pictures of gory accidents, pitiful tales of impoverished people, politically biased stories, racial stereotypes, and just plain mean submissions.
And I deal with flames sympathetically. When community or family members write, I respectfully listen to their point of view. Our discussions sometimes lead to a story being removed. Other times, the family realizes that they can take solace from knowing that their loss might help others avoid the same mistake, if it is used as a “safety lesson” by the Darwin Awards.
The heart and soul of the Darwin Awards is on the Internet. All the stories are available on the website, updated with facts and comments from readers. The Slush Pile is brimming with new submissions. My goal is to maintain a network of people who love the Darwin Awards, and keep this cultural icon true to its origins.
FAQ: What is evolution?
Four attributes cause a species to evolve. (1) The species must show variation. (2) That variation must be inheritable. (3) Not all members of the population survive to reproduce, but (4) the inherited characteristics of some members make them more likely to do so.
FAQ: Are humans really evolving?
Yes! Evolution is the process of a species changing over time to better survive in its environment. The mechanism of evolution is simplicity itself: “Survival of the fittest.” A species improves gradually over thousands of generations because of differences in individual rates of reproduction. Evolution eliminates the dodo who does not avoid the club. It eliminates the driver who weaves around on the freeway while yakking on a cell phone. Humans who beget children have their genes represented in the next generation. Those who do not survive to reproduce—do not.
Whether the Darwin Awards represent human evolution is less clear. Is there really a set of genes that causes a man to strap a mortar firework onto his football helmet? Do genes really play a role in deciding to kiss a shark? These decisions do not have a direct genetic link.
But if a person does not survive to leave offspring, then she is manifestly less fit to survive than the rest of us. Her genes are not part of the next generation. And we can only hope that the next generation will no longer find people jumping into bear cages, surfing into storm drains, or whacking bugs with artillery shells.
Keep in mind that the Darwin Awards also illustrate the creativity that distinguishes us from less adaptable species. The same innovative spirit that causes the downfall of a Darwin Award winner is also responsible for the social and scientific advances that make the human race great.
FAQ: Why aren’t the winners those with the highest votes!?
If votes were all that mattered, you would see many more stories about testicles and sex. Put one or both of these in a story, and its score goes up. Grotesque or especially painful stories also get an artificial boost. Ewww! I let the popular vote guide my preference—but not rule it.
The vote does overrule my opinion if I love a story that has a low score. For instance, a California man working on his laptop while driving drifted over the centerline and was killed. Ha ha! Ha. Bafflingly unpopular! I rewrote the story more than once, trying to convey the humor I saw, but still I laughed alone. Its score remained low, perhaps because minor injuries were suffered by people in the car he hit. In the end, I heed the conscience of my readers and remove unpopular stories.
FAQ: Would you explain the categories?
There are two categories: the Darwin Award and the At Risk Survivor. Darwin Awards are given to those who can no longer reproduce. At Risk Survivors are just that: people who narrowly escaped a Darwin Award. Many of these are personal accounts, and they are some of my favorites. A near-death experience, written by the selfsame idiot who planned it and survived it, certainly serves as a sobering cautionary tale! Most events are confirmed by news reports; some are plausible eyewitness accounts lacking solid confirmation. Unconfirmed Darwin Awards and At Risk Survivors are clearly labeled.
My previous four-category organization caused confusion. There were Darwin Awards, Honorable Mentions, Personal Accounts, and Urban Legends. Each story was either confirmed or unconfirmed. Honorable Mentions were near misses, but even longtime readers often assumed that they were less astounding Darwin Awards. Personal Accounts sometimes were confirmed by news reports or eyewitnesses, causing them to overlap with both Darwin Awards and Honorable Mentions. Urban Legends elicited unfounded scuttlebut regarding the veracity of the Darwin Awards. New legends are scarce now anyway, so the category had languished. The situation is much clearer with only two categories.
FAQ: MEN, Men, men, why so many men?
Nearly all Darwin Award nominees are male. I am aware that males are responsible for aggressive and irrational phenomena like wars, organized religion, drunken driving, et cetera, but pure statistics lead me to believe that more females should be candidates. Is a feminist conspiracy at work in the selection of the candidates?
—Concerned Reader
I call ’em as I see ’em. I choose as many women as I can—but I can’t use material I don’t have. Most of the idiots nominated for this ignominious award are male.
Women are far more likely to be At Risk Survivors than Darwin Award winners, and many of the incidents involving a woman also involve a man. It’s difficult to come up with even one chapter per book pertaining exclusively to women. This book has no chapter on women, but the following stories do feature a femme fatale:
Falling in Love—page 8
Weight Lift—page 10
High on Life—page 15
Revenge of Mother Love—page 49
Stop. Look. Listen—page 66
Organ Donors—page 72
Mexican Divorce—page 77
Chivalry Rebuffed—page 79
Tales from the Finnish Forest—page 115
Chemistry Went to Her Head—page 165
Star Wars—page 197
MEN, Men, men. Without them, where would we be?
Chapterless!
FAQ: Is there an actual physical Darwin Award?
No! Who would I give it to?
This was the #1 question asked by two hundred grammar-school children at my recent book talk. “It would be great if there was an actual Darwin Award!” Recently we began to brainstorm ideas. A herd of sheep on a simple base? A small gray tombstone? R.I.P.
An official certificate? A coffin? A statue of Charles Darwin?
How about a beagle—do you get the reference? Someday there will be an actual, physical Darwin Award that you can give to a boneheaded friend.
FAQ: What are your aspirations?
To be an advisor for MythBusters’ Darwinian episodes. MythBusters rocks! To publish a children’s book of the true adventures of Rock, Paper, and Scissors—squirrels I raised from babies to live in the wild. To see my T-shirts, greeting cards, pint glasses, boxers, bumper stickers in stores everywhere! To earn a Ph.D. and become a science writer who is astute and witty enough to fill the shoes of Carl Sagan.
FAQ: Are you making a TV show?
Darwin Awards: The Movie is available on DVD. It was written and directed by Finn Taylor and filmed in the
San Francisco Bay Area, using local talent. The movie stars Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder. Vignettes include MythBusters hosts Jamie and Adam, and the rock band Metallica. This movie is serious silly fun.
Wendy’s Movie Vignettes
www.DarwinAwards.com/book/movie.html
Darwin Awards: The Musical, a sensational musical composed by Stephen Witkin, Joey Miller, and Mitch Magonet, is coming to a theatrical stage near you. When Stephen accosted me at a book signing and told me he wanted to write a musical, I reached for the Q-tips. A musical?! But his ideas and script are awesome. Beach Blanket Babylon meets Avenue Q. Great songs have been composed, and the show continues to be developed while seeking Off-Broadway producers.
Darwin Awards: The TV Show. Last but not least, longtime Darwin artist and animator Jay Ziebarth (see his biography) is working on a TV show animating Darwin Awards vignettes. Stay tuned for more!
FAQ: I saw the Movie. Does it violate the Rules?
Producers assured me that my comments were taken under advisement, which translated into little input on the script. Regrettably, some vignettes in the movie violate the Darwin Awards Rules.
A man accidentally shoots himself while rescuing a friend. That would never become a Darwin Award. People who risk themselves to help others are heroic, not stupid!
The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool Page 16