The 6 Stupidest Things Ever Done on a Dare

After espying this whimsy-baited fracture machine, the morning's plans suddenly took shape. The man's friends dared him to tie himself to the carousel with packing tape (which they had presumably brought along because they were planning on killing him anyway) while they spun the carousel around as fast as they could. The man, honor bound to accept this challenge either by sheer boredom or because it was issued on a Sunday morning in Germany (a phrase here meaning "he was almost certainly drunk"), agreed, and he was lashed to a giant metal child's toy wrought from exceedingly low production standards with tape generally used to keep cardboard boxes from spilling Garfield books all over the floor.

The situation quickly escalated, as dares tend to do, and the man's friends decided that the best way to up the stakes and maximize everyone's enjoyment would be to spin the carousel using the car they'd driven to the playground. The man either agreed with them or was already choking on too much vomit to form a coherent objection, so they tied the car to the carousel and drove off as fast as they could, sending their friend into a gravity-negating spin typically reserved for astronaut training.

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"... one giant leap for dumbass kind."

Predictably, the tape came loose, and the man was thrown from the carousel like Super Dave Osborne in a carnival explosion. He was killed more or less immediately, and his friends were treated at the hospital for shock before being charged with involuntary manslaughter. We assume that this means he "won" the dare, although we hasten to point out that he would've been awarded the exact same amount of nothing for "losing," with the added bonus of getting to still be alive.

So, not wanting to back down from this hero's trial for all the wisdom in the universe, he went out to a freeway ramp in the middle of the night, waited for a car to come speeding along, then jumped into the road and sprinted toward it. In his underwear. It is unclear whether that last detail was part of the original dare or just an added touch of personal flair.

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"This was the original plan, but we didn't have enough for the deposit."

Despite whatever synth-driven 1980s victory montage was playing in the man's mind as he vowed to himself that he would not be the first to flinch, the scene ultimately boiled down to two sentences in a news article:

"[An] 18-year-old South Morang man is in the Royal Melbourne Hospital after he was struck by a Toyota Hilux on the Tullamarine Freeway near Flemington just before 1:30 a.m. He had been playing 'chicken' on the freeway on ramp as a dare when he was hit, police said."

This is another way of saying "Some idiot tap-danced out onto the freeway and ran headfirst into an SUV."

The driver of the Hilux had no idea what was happening (see condition B of the dare, above) and just saw some naked maniac suddenly appear out of the darkness like a heroin-addicted vampire. The resulting collision was enough to total the vehicle, but by some improbable alignment of the stars, the runner himself wasn't killed. The police give due consideration to his "utter stupidity," but nowhere in the article are any other bystanders mentioned. This suggests that either the man's mates (we're in Australia, remember?) assigned him the dare but then declined to actually watch him complete it, or that they had only ever existed in the alcohol-brined echoes of his own thoughts.

According to The New York Times, Jamison, his young bride-to-be and pretty much the entire Fourth of July party were so enthusiastic about this dare (and let's be honest, it was probably Jamison himself who initially said "Hey, who dares me to marry this girl?" after being overcome with a boner fueled by beer and depression) that they went and found a reverend to perform the ceremony that day. Because as we all know, you shouldn't waste time overthinking something as intrinsically hilarious as marriage.

While backstage at a show in Germany, Kroeger and the Nickelbacks found themselves seized by relentless boredom (see "Bavaria," above). Prankmeister Kroeger sprang into action, describing his disarmingly cheeky solution in his own words: "... there was an old fan with a metal blade. And we paid the drum tech about 600 deutsche marks [to] stick his Johnson in the fan."

"It was that or 10,000 deutsche marks to listen to our whole album."

This roadie was apparently so underpaid that 600 deutsche marks seemed reasonable, accepting the dare without ceremony, to Kroeger's endlessly self-satisfied amusement: "I can still hear the 'bleh-bleh-blehhhhhhh' of the blade slowly spluttering to a stop... It was fantastic." Unfortunately, nobody had taken the time to explain to Kroeger that this is a dare routinely issued by drunken fifth-year college seniors, and as such is perhaps the lamest rock star story in the history of music journalism.

Kyle DuBois, an 18-year-old high school student, had just finished an assignment in his electrical trades class (which we weren't aware was a thing until just now) and went to the back of the room with a few of his friends to play around with some of the electrical equipment. Seeing as how "Don't Fuck Around With Electricity" is presumably Chapter One in every electrical engineering textbook ever printed, this suggests that Kyle perhaps wasn't the best student, or that his instructor had catastrophically failed to interpret the material. Either way, after a few minutes of shocking themselves with some loose wires and various other things that have no business being left unsupervised in a classroom, a couple of Kyle's friends dared him to attach some alligator clamps to his nipples in exchange for a Mountain Dew.

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It was destiny.

As anyone who was ever in high school knows, peer pressure can be a powerful thing, especially when you're locked in a steely-eyed chess match of one-upsmanship. Kyle, lured by the tantalizing prize of a can of Mountain Dew (which incidentally is a soda marketed specifically to stupid teenagers) and not wanting to seem like a "square" or a "ninnyhammer," accepted the dare and heroically sent a powerful electric current through his man-maries. The article is unclear (and indeed we cannot even begin to suggest) what the hell his teacher was doing at this time.

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"Can you believe that these people expect us to be 'teaching' an entire classroom? Not with this hangover."

Kyle went into cardiac arrest pretty much immediately and was rushed to the hospital with respiratory failure, from which he eventually recovered. His parents filed a lawsuit against the school for allowing the incident to occur, although we're curious as to why they feel that their son, who at age 18 is legally considered an adult, would need someone to tell him that completing an electrical circuit with his chest was probably not worth a 65-cent can of Mountain Dew.

Russell, drawing upon every ounce of wisdom his 13 years had to offer, decided that this was the only way the afternoon could possibly continue at the level of enjoyment established by YouTube and accepted the dare set forth to him by his friend. He flicked on the lighter, and as Russell later told the news, "a combination of the spark and fumes caught his shorts on fire," which is hilarious in that it both minimizes his role in the blaze and suggests that "bursting into flames" was a result no one could have reasonably expected.

Russell was hospitalized with several burns, and his mother took YouTube to task for not thoroughly screening all 78 billion of its videos for any behavior that could possibly be imitated by paint-drinking latchkey children.

"Hmmm, she may have a point here."