|  European Mirror  |  Deutsch  |  Français  |

Media Archive

“Only two things are infinite — the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so sure about the universe,” Albert Einstein once said. And our species is stupid, isn’t it? Learning that the plate our waiter has placed before us is “right out of the oven and very hot” we wait for him to leave, then touch the plate. It is our nature to act, sometimes without regard to the outcome. Add tragic elements like, say, a 19-year-old playing Russian roulette with a semiautomatic pistol (there’s always a bullet chambered in a semiautomatic, rendering winning impossible) and you’ve got a Darwin Award (www.DarwinAwards.com).

Named after scientist Charles Darwin, the awards are based on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, or survival of the fittest. Thus, as demonstrated by the young man above, people who end their lives through stupid acts are actually part of the evolution of man, that is, not fit enough to survive, and doing the rest of us a favor by removing their genes from the pool. The throwing of oneself on the evolutionary hand grenade is commemorated with a Darwin Award, albeit posthumously. If a Website devoted to chronicling the tragic endings of slow-witted humans sounds macabre, well, it is. But like watching a filmed train wreck, who among us can look away?

Take the account posted on the Website of a woman who won an award after getting just a little too high from smoking marijuana: “A North Carolina woman learned a hard lesson about drugs when she decided to sleep on the roof. Police reports say that Patricia and her boyfriend had been drinking and smoking marijuana, when they decided to enjoy the fresh air on the roof of the King Charles Inn. They climbed over a guardrail with pillows and blankets, and fell asleep under the stars. Sound asleep, apparently. Patricia slid off the roof and fell to her death on Hasell Street shortly before dawn on Sunday. When police arrived at the scene, the boyfriend was found still sleeping on the roof, curled up in a blanket and pillow. The death has been ruled accidental, but we feel that the blame belongs to the stoned woman who chose to snooze on the roof.”

And the list goes on. And on. An award goes to the guy who strung a power line from his home into a river in order to electrocute nearby fish. Forgetting to turn the power off before fetching his catch, our winner wades into the water and joins his would-be dinner in their fate.

Also grabbing a statuette is the fellow who, instead of turning the wood chipper off before trying to repair it, climbs on with the machine still running and unwittingly re-enacts Steve Buscemi’s Fargo scene. Wendy Northcutt is the Website’s creator and author of The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action (Dutton), in which she quotes Einstein’s theorty of human stupidity. She suggests a combination of elements makes it possible for us to laugh in the face of someone else’s death.

“Part of it is almost a sense of divine justice,” Northcutt, a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology, says. “We laugh at it partly because we can see ourselves in their shoes. And part of it is like when you’re watching a movie and you can just see the end coming and as it’s getting closer and closer you know what’s going to happen, and the guy goes slowly over the waterfall. We can see more than the actors can see.” Northcutt says the impersonal nature of the Internet creates enough distance from the subject for us to find humor in his demise. “The Internet is so anonymous,” she says. “If you hear in general that someone was wearing headphones while riding a bicycle and they got run over by a jet because they were riding down a runway, as long as it’s impersonal like that we can laugh at it. And the Internet is very impersonal.”

Northcutt learned of the original “Darwin Awards” from an e-mail she received as a college student in the early ’90’s. Memorializing fallen fools via the Internet gradually became a full-time occupation. “As soon as I heard about the Darwin Awards, I started looking for every one I could find,” she says. “I stumbled into it pretty much at the same time I started my Website.” Through word of mouth, the award part of her site grew and grew, ultimately spawning its own site and book.

The Silicon Valley resident says she’s tried to make her Darwin Awards, and site (there are competitors out there) a free, democratic forum for remembering the dumb and the dead. “I started the Website and I got a lot of stories (she receives 1,000 e-mails a week, and her site averages around 800,000 visitors a month) and I had to formulate some rules because people would argue about which stories were Darwin’s,” she says. “I made the rules and then I decided to add voting; I tried to make my Darwin Awards site the site of the people. I think that’s sort of why it became the Darwin Award site.”

To qualify for a Darwin Award, the candidate must:

Remove himself from the gene pool (i.e. die).

Exhibit an astounding misapplication of judgment.

Be the cause of his or her own demise.

Be capable of sound judgment.

In addition, the event must be verified.

Naturally Northcutt receives her fair share of unhappy e-mails from creationists displeased with the notion of evolution. “There is apparently a fairly strong contingent of people in the U.S. who think evolution is something they can dismiss,” she says. “If you think about a guy who blows off his testicles, you can laugh at it, but he’s not going to be around to reproduce again. As long as you can laugh at that kind of story, you get natural selection. That’s the essence of evolution.”