The 6 Stupidest Things Ever Done on a Dare

6 "I Dare You to Tape Yourself to This Carousel While We Spin It With a Car"

A man in Bavaria was loitering in a children's playground with three of his friends, because there is literally nothing else to do in Bavaria that doesn't involve chocolate castles and/or wish-granting forest trolls. He and his friends eventually happened upon a carousel, the one piece of equipment that is found in pretty much every playground despite the fact that it is virtually guaranteed to injure more children than a rusty jungle gym made of tetanus.

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.

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.

5 "I Dare You to Play Chicken Without a Car"

Chicken is a game invented by movies from the 1950s wherein two men hop into their cars and barrel toward each other at breakneck speed to see who swerves first (there are several variations to this core set of rules, most notably the Paula Abdul variant). It is a pastime based almost exclusively on dares and hand-wringing women in poodle skirts.

An 18-year-old man in Victoria, Australia, recently faced this time-honored challenge, but with a few extra conditions to spice things up, because Australians are crazy. The dare presented to him stipulated that A) he must participate in the proposed game of chicken without a car of his own and B) his opponents in the game would have no idea that they were playing chicken.

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.

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:

" 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.

4 "I Dare You to Marry Me," Said a 60-Year-Old Man to a Teenage Girl

Charles E. Jamison, a 60-year-old widower with grown children, was facing the sobering loneliness of weathering his twilight years soaked in the bitter tears of having forever lost the comforting embrace of the soul mate he had expected to carry him through the rest of his life into peaceful eternity. So, at a boisterous celebration of America's independence, he got drunk enough to commit mild sexual assault (also known as "hotel bar drunk") and married a 17-year-old girl after being dared into it by their mutual friends. We are curious as to how a teenage girl and a senior citizen would ever occupy the same social group unless they were both X-Men or railroad tycoons (not mutually exclusive), but this was a different time.

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.

3 "I Dare You to Stick Your Junk in the Fan," Said Chad Kroeger of Nickelback

Any dare involving Nickelback is inherently tragic, as one would immediately assume that the dare would involve listening to Nickelback's music in some fashion. However, the band's frontman, Chad Kroeger, is apparently quite the charming, rascally prankster, as attested to by no less valid a source than Kroeger himself in an interview about how charming and rascally he is. Kroeger describes his delightfully mischievous nature in one of the most hilariously contradictory sentences ever published: "We've always been very close to our crew, so we've had a lot of fun getting them to do silly, stupid things that could possibly cause them to hurt or injure themselves in some way." This is the same way a sociopath describes his relationship with the people chained beneath plastic tarps in his rumpus room.

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 stick his Johnson in the fan."

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.

2 "I Dare You to Electrocute Your Nipples"

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.

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.

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.

1 "I Dare You to Set Yourself on Fire"

Florida 13-year-old Russell Gortzig and one of his friends were engaged in the age-old tradition of imitating things they see on the Internet, because as 80 percent of this article has illustrated, teenagers tend to do some dumbshit things. After watching a video on YouTube, Russell soaked himself in gasoline, at which point his friend dared him to hold up a lighter and snap it on (we're curious as to whether the gasoline was part of the dare or if "gasoline showers" were a fixture of playdates with Russell). The article does not indicate what video prompted the dare, so we will assume that it was either that clip from Ghost Rider 2 where Nicolas Cage pees fire or that clip from Face/Off where Nicolas Cage sets everyone on fire while disguised as John Travolta.

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.