I Love YouTube: Dudes' Heads Melting Off from Crazy Peppers

My whole life long, it seems, I've had a deep and abiding love. A passion whose intensity has never wavered, even in the down times. My wife finds it baffling - almost offensive - but I remain steadfast in my devotion.

 

I love America's Funniest Home Videos.

 

Bob Saget, Daisy Fuentes, Tom Bergeron… it doesn't matter. Those shaky shots of backyard carnage are little golden fried nuggets of sparkling, sprinkle coated diamond doughnut pleasure jammers that just viciously and with ruthless efficiency attack and punish my lizard-brain schadenfreude cortex.

The babies are funny, the dogs are funny, the sports bloopers make me laugh. What really makes me lift up levitation' and vibration' are the ones where dudes are punished trying and failing to impress their dumbass friends. Backyard wrestling moves, trampoline stunts, rope swings, kids trying to launch their BMXes off of dirt mounds, all those "hey man watch this" moments that inevitably results in a dirt lunch for a windless gasping dude are what get me going. Pride cometh before a fall, and it also maketh the fall a lot more funnyeth. 

What America's Funniest Home Videos invented, though, YouTube has perfected. I get to be my own editor as I trawl through the mountains of videos people have put up of their friends getting messed up - if not on purpose then on whatever purpose floats out of daring a dude to do something stupid so strangers can laugh at it on the internet. They're longer-form than AFV clips, more sophisticated and more raw. They're sublime.

Some of my favourites are videos of people who decide - for whatever unfathomable reason - to eat incredibly hot food on camera. There are all these weird undercurrents on YouTube: videos of people that erotically smoke pipes with their shirts off and their fans for example, but the pepper ones are fascinating because it's a window into a weird game of international one-upmanship over the machismo of eating painful food while your friends watch. 

This kid is my favourite, the ego-free id-reaction of pure what-the-f**k-did-I-put-in-my-mouth-ism that contextualizes the rest of these pepper dudes trying to be tougher than this unfortunate gomer:

 

 

This guy is the prototypical YouTube chilli eating dude. Conservative haircut and glasses, serious in-the-basement solo heat experiments done with a dedication to technical, physiological accuracy that would do scientists from the '50s watching test pilots puke in a g-force centrifuge would envy. Only the nose ring, the placard with a pickle on it and his freakish need to ritualistically communicate the intensity of his self-inflicted pain mark him out as the weird hero he is:

 

 

"We're in another world, here. I feel cold. I've lost the ability to talk." These guys, fellow chilli testers, try out the "bhut jolokia" aka "ghost pepper" aka "cobra chilli" aka "the hottest pepper in the world":

Here we see the bhut jolokia completely de-professionalize a jackass sports news dude in approximately 3.6 seconds:

21:12 3/5/10 Female caller reports a werewolf attacking a man trying to brush his teeth. All units investigate:

How fine the line, between order and chaos… stability and nightmare puking lunacy:

 

 

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