|  European Mirror  |  Deutsch  |  Français  |

Media Archive

Northcutt likes snakes but,unlike some hapless people in her book, hasn’t been killed by one.

The problem with the gene pool, comedian Steven Wright has deadpanned, is that there’s no lifeguard.

Wendy Northcutt does not lament this lack of supervision. She prefers to applaud those judgment-impaired individuals who assist the human evolutionary process by venturing from the shallow end and naturally selecting themselves out of the species.

In other words, they end their lives in the most idiotic ways imaginable.

The Silicon Valley resident is the creator of the Internet cult-favorite www.DarwinAwards.com, a Web site dedicated to immortalizing people such as the unfortunate man who attempted to unclog his company’s jammed wood chipper—while the machine was running.

Even if you’ve never seen the movie ‘‘Fargo,’’ you can figure out what happened. Let’s just say DNA analysis was required for a positive identification.

‘‘You have to wonder about somebody who doesn’t disconnect the power before climbing up there to break up the logjam,’’ says Northcutt. ‘‘And he owns the darn company! How stupid can you get?

‘‘The tree of life,’’ she concludes sardonically, ‘‘is self-pruning.’’

So, she awarded him a posthumous ‘‘Darwin’’—named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution. There are plenty of other nominees who no longer are with us because, as Northcutt points out, just when you thought somebody couldn’t be more dimwitted, along comes another contender to stake his or her claim to a not-so-coveted Darwin.

Till death do us part
During a heated marital dispute in a working-class (Buenos Aires) neighborhood, a 25-year-old man picked up his 20-year-old wife and threw her off their eighth-floor apartment balcony.

To his dismay, she became tangled in the power lines below. He immediately leapt from the balcony and fell toward his wife. We can only speculate as to his reasons. Was he angrily trying to finish the job, or remorsefully hoping to rescue her? He did not accomplish either goal. He missed the power lines completely, and plunged to his death.

The woman managed to swing over to a nearby balcony and was saved.

Source: ‘‘The Darwin Awards’’; www.DarwinAwards .com

What Northcutt does, in effect, is laugh in the wake of death. Yes, it can be tasteless, macabre, twisted . . . and quite often hysterical. How can you not chuckle at the terrorist who mailed a letter bomb, only to open the package when it was returned because of insufficient postage?

Nothing sacred

It figures that this sort of gallows humor would thrive in the irreverent, anything-goes culture of the Internet, where nothing is held sacred. But it’s also undeniable that Northcutt’s brainchild has mainstream mass appeal because the site now has spawned a best-selling book, ‘‘The Darwin Awards’’ (Dutton), which one English newspaper described as the non-survival of the thickest.

Northcutt provides more than 300 pages of human misadventure. For instance, there’s the Australian who killed himself while filming a forklift safety video. Another tale recounts how a Kenyan, upon being spotted stealing from an offering plate, rushed out of the church—only to be hit by a speeding bus.

One of Northcutt’s favorites is the story of a Buenos Aires man who failed in his attempt to become a widower. (See box at left.)

‘‘The Darwins take a wry look at human behavior,’’ Northcutt explains. ‘‘I think at some level, we all feel pretty lucky to have made it this far. We all can look back on the dumb things we’ve done, and it’s amazing that we’re still here.’’

Others aren’t so lucky. It should come as no surprise that these Stupid Death Tricks often involve dangerous combinations of alcohol, testosterone, explosive materials, various types of deadly snakes, a poor understanding of electricity and, of course, goldfish.

Goldfish? Well, there was the Ohio man who, on a dare, agreed to swallow a five-inch fish that had been eating the other inhabitants of its aquarium. The goldfish, whose tail was sticking out of the man’s mouth when paramedics arrived on the scene, claimed one final victim.

‘You’re so evil!’

Now, that mental picture might not strike you as the least bit funny. Clearly some people believe that poking fun at the dead—no matter how absurd their untimely demise—is just plain wrong.

Northcutt has heard from them. She gets negative e-mail, sometimes from surviving relatives of those she ridicules, that often declares: ‘‘You’re so evil! I hate you!’’ (Other e-mailers can’t understand why she believes in evolution.)

Northcutt also has received threats. Take, for instance, what happened after the 1999 collapse of a massive bonfire structure on the Texas A&M campus that left 12 people dead. The way the Web site works is visitors can suggest people ‘‘deserving’’ of Darwins. People kept nominating the Texas A&M students, and Northcutt repeatedly removed the story from the site because she believed the victims had every right to believe the log tower, long a school tradition, was safe.

But when she opened up the subject for debate, members of the Texas A&M community learned of the discussion and were not amused. They deluged Northcutt with e-mail.

‘‘One guy wrote, ‘I’ve got a rusty spoon right here and I’m going to scoop your testicles out with it,’ ’’ she recalls. ‘‘That scared me, and I don’t even have testicles!’’

Too shy for People

Evil is just about the last way you could describe Northcutt. Meeting over hot chocolate at a bookstore, Northcutt comes across as a pleasant and somewhat shy woman who seems genuinely stunned that the Darwins have grown to the point where television producers now are pitching projects to her.

Although her success is built around publicizing the final, embarrassing details of people’s lives, Northcutt is adamant about protecting her own privacy. She doesn’t do book signings, swears me to secrecy about which city she lives in and refuses to have her picture taken in a way that she can be recognized. Recently, People magazine told Northcutt that it would not run a planned profile of her unless she agreed to a photo showing her face. Northcutt decided she could live without having People tell her life story.

Some weird encounters on the Internet, she explains, have made her cautious. Exhibit A: Mr. Rusty Spoon.

But Northcutt does drop the cloak of mystery just a bit to provide a few personal glimpses. She’s 37 (‘‘It’s a prime number!’’) and engaged. Growing up as a military brat, she admits to having been a mischievous kid who made her parents worry whenever they smelled smoke or heard no noise coming from her bedroom. But she survived childhood, got a molecular biology degree from UC-Berkeley and later was working in a Stanford laboratory.

Creating a monster

The Darwins were nothing more than a lark. Though she has popularized the awards, she didn’t invent the concept or coin the phrase. When a cousin first told her about them, she began collecting stories. Just for fun, she put her archive on the Stanford Web server in 1994, back in the Internet’s infancy, and the Darwins evolved and grew with rapid expansion of the Web.
Northcutt’s book was published in October. Her Web site gets a million hits each month, and 150,000 fans subscribe to her e-mail bulletin.

It sounds, I say, like she became a Frankenstein, creating a monster that grew out of control.

‘‘I already was Frankenstein,’’ Northcutt responds. ‘‘I was creating stuff in a neurobiology lab, working with mutant DNA, probing our very genes.’’

But to put this in Darwinian terms, Northcutt had found her true niche. Now, her Web site receives 1 million visitors a month. The site has been ranked in various ‘‘cool sites’’ and ‘‘hot picks’’ lists of Internet destinations. About 150,000 people get her regular newsletter.

She’s invented a whole Darwin universe, complete with her own rules—such as, kids can’t be nominated. (‘‘The Darwins are supposed to be make us laugh, and kids dying isn’t funny,’’ she explains.) When readers submit stories, she tries to confirm them. Each year, she bestows Darwin Awards on the ‘‘best.’’ People who don’t quite successfully kill themselves performing foolish stunts receive ‘‘At-Risk Survivors.’’ When she identifies a story as a hoax, she files it in a section called ‘‘urban legends.’’

‘‘Sometimes people will argue with me about which stories are true and about what is and isn’t a Darwin,’’ she adds. ‘‘I’ll finally say, ‘I’ve got the final word. I’m Darwin.’ ’’

Tragedy sells

With a bestselling book, Darwin also is making money. That means Northcutt now has reporters asking how she feels about profiting from the ultimate misfortune of others. But Northcutt, who also works as a freelance Web site designer, says she feels no ethical dilemma.

‘‘Am I a bad person because I’m doing this?’’ she asks. ‘‘Well, we’re not doing anything to these people. They’re doing it to themselves. It’s only after the fact that we’re pointing a finger and laughing.’’

Northcutt adds that she’s sorry if she offends anyone with stories such as the Canadian who created a mummy costume one Halloween by wrapping himself in cotton gauze, but then also decided to light a cigarette.

If it’s any consolation, Northcutt considers herself a potential Darwin candidate. She describes herself as a klutz. She also is fascinated by fireworks, has a trampoline and is the proud owner of a 4-foot-long snake.

But wait, if Darwin herself pulls a Darwin, who will be left to document the event for posterity’s sake? ‘‘My fiance can do Web sites, too,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m sure he’ll go right in there and record it.’’