5 Bad Jokes That Literally Ruined People's Lives

Who hasn't been in a situation in which a goofball friend emails them porn? I spent the better part of my college days receiving pornographic images of transgender people, grandmothers, large groups of friendly gay fellows, amputees, little people, and those with weak bladders from one of my friends -- who, in retrospect, had a lot of dysfunction in his life. To a very specific kind of person, nothing is funnier than sending pornography to someone whom they know doesn't actually want to receive it. This person is often called an "unfunny asshole." But there are a lot of them out there.

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By and large, receiving unsolicited porn is a minor inconvenience in your day. You open an email, and then either make a face and delete it or kind of nod a little and save the files for later. Such was not the case for Andrew Holland. A friend sent him a video of a woman having sex with a tiger. As a result, Holland was arrested and put on bail for six months. When word got out, he was harassed so mercilessly by online vigilantes that he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. He lost his job, and was forced out of town by the relentless harassment, which included physical beatings. He was also labelled a pedophile by people who just started to make guesses as to what he was charged with, which caused him to lose contact with his daughter for over a year. And to this, you might think "Good, that's what you get for having sick porn on your computer." Except he didn't.

As it turned out, the tiger in the video was actually a man in a tiger suit. Somehow, in defiance of logic and the ability to both see and hear things, no one noticed until after this debacle spiraled into an utter shitstorm of life-ruining stupidity that the tiger in the video could speak, and said things like "They're grrrrrrrreat!" And let's not forget, it was also a man in a suit. When have you ever confused a man in a suit with the real thing?

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How did Holland get victimized so brutally? He was the first victim of a newly-enacted law against "extreme pornography," and prosecutors wanted a great case to use as their first one. So they prosecuted the shit out of him without anyone ever stopping to watch the video. It wasn't until he'd been through several rounds in court that someone took the time to listen to the audio and discovered that the "cat" could talk, resulting in charges being dropped. But the damage was already done.

So let this be a lesson to you porn-sharers: You may destroy the lives of your friends. So only do it if it's funny enough.

Do you remember Justine Sacco? She became infamous in 2013 when she went to South Africa. With one single tweet from an airport, she literally ruined her own life. No hyperbole or anything; she screwed herself like a light bulb in a whirlpool, and even became the inspiration for the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. What terrible thing did Sacco do? She made a joke. This joke:

Let it soak in for a moment. Roll it on the tongue and get a good feel for it. What is it? A bad-taste joke? Sure. What did it mean? What would happen if you had said it? For Justine, it meant viral insanity. She tweeted right before getting on an airplane, and had no access to Twitter for the entire 11-hour flight. When she landed, she got a text from a friend saying that she was sorry. "Sorry for what?" Sacco wondered. Then the shit hit the fan.

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Sacco was the #1 trending topic on Twitter across the entire world. Hundreds of thousands of people had retweeted or responded with disgust. The company she worked for (as a PR person, no less) had announced that they found it outrageous and offensive, but that the employee in question was unreachable.

You could follow in real time the storm of madness, and the eventual realization everyone had that they were ahead of Sacco in this game. The anger was mixed with excitement, as people realized she didn't know any of this was going on. So they were now all in on the counter-joke, which was going to be her landing and discovering that her life was over, all in real time. In fact, someone went to the airport just to snap a pic of her when she got off the plane.

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Sacco lost her job. Workers in Africa threatened to walk off the job at the hotels she was booked to stay at. The world was raining shit down upon her, and it wasn't stopping. Imagine one of your stupider moments being held aloft for the world -- the entire world -- to see and make fun of and criticize. That was what Sacco had done to herself. She made herself a villain solely through sucking at telling jokes.

Some sources say that Autumn hadn't seen her mom in a decade, which would have made her three when her mom left. So it's not hard to understand why the girl said it would have been a dream come true to actually meet her mom on the show. It's also not hard to understand why she started crying when local pseudo-funnyman Chuop Rolin came out dressed in drag pretending to be the girl's mom while the host mocked her for believing they were actually going to follow through on their promise. Stupid eighth-grade girl, having hopes and dreams based on the promises of adults! You idiot!

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You'll be happy to know that publicly devastating a child is not a cultural thing. It's actually frowned upon just about everywhere, except on TLC. The Cambodian audience was quick to express their disgust with the show, to the point where the producers eventually sent the girl a letter of apology. She gracefully accepted, and made a statement saying that she didn't think they were trying to be malicious -- which was nice of her, since it seems like that was all they were trying to do.

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When I was a young 'un, my prank of choice was to simply affix another kid's belongings and mattress to the roof while he was out. It was funny then and it's funny now. At the Christian camp Wo-Me-To, they decided that a better prank would be to go all mad chemist and mix some deer spray with Liquid Ass.

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What happens when a chemical meant to ward off a couple hundred pounds of deer meets a chemical developed solely to trick people into thinking someone shit their pants? The hazmat team gets called, and six campers need to be hospitalized due to violent reactions -- including breathing difficulties and eye irritation. It turns out that ass and anti-deer merges into a Voltron of volatility which attacks your flesh like a ravenous beast intent on making you leak mucus and tears like a burlap sack full of extremely upset babies.

A dozen campers had to be decontaminated, while six needed medical treatment. Plus, two cabins had to be thoroughly cleansed, thanks to the ungodly brew. The lesson the campers learned was that you have to put the Liquid Ass in someone else's cabin, then run really fast. Otherwise, you're all screwed.

Nowadays, we know that any hilarious joke has a dark side, and that somehow, nut shots can in fact turn out badly. What seems like a harmless way to inflict massive pain to someone's reproductive organs can actually do worse things than the obvious.

Somewhere in the ball-yanking part of Ireland, a 17-year-old lad was rabble-rousing with some school chums when one of them sprung the ol' Irish Steamwhistle on him, grabbing a handful of scrote and yanking it ... to the point he was sent spiraling into cardiac arrest. A pause, please -- not to be aghast, but to be in awe of someone who can jerk your goody bag so hard that your heart says "Oh, fuck this" and goes all jabberwock on the spot. That's absolutely amazing. Terrifying, yes, but amazing.

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Someone had to perform CPR on the kid until emergency services arrived, after which he was taken to a hospital and put into an induced coma. Again, what epic marble bag attack was this? What George R. R. Martin villain must this other kid have been, to so emphatically lay waste to a friend's nuts in an apparently non-malicious fashion? And also, how? Did he reach up a leg of the boy's bloomers? Were they having a sword fight by the bike rack? Did they pop out like some grandpa's elongated Bubblicious snail trail, and the other kid just couldn't resist grabbing hold and swinging like Tarzan? We may never know.

Read about the genius who joked about a bomb and shut down an airport in The 5 Most Epic Backfires in the History of Bad Jokes, and learn how Zach Braff is a jerk (even outside of his movies) in 7 Celebrity Pranks That Backfired Horrifically.

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