Our News is Written in Stone™
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Fans of reality television — this is the polite way of describing people who revel in the humiliation of others — are in for shameful extremes of pleasure next week. Japanese game shows are coming our way.
Ritualized humiliation festivals are not my field, but daily life has its reality show moments. Most of us limit it to those toothpaste-on-the-lapel moments that seem not so bad until you wake at 2 a.m. and realize fellow diners might have thought it was something that was not toothpaste.
But we avoid the major agonies, the ones where you have to smile through a spreading pool of dignity blood. Like that U.S. cable reality show combining competitive eating and extreme sports. It is called Hurl. We will neither watch nor appear on Hurl, we announce.
In Japan, the equivalent declaration would be "I will not tie slabs of raw meat to my face, stick my head out of an onstage hole and try to be the last contestant standing before a ballistic Komodo dragon bites into my skull and dredges my thinker. I find this degrading."
Esquire offered an online sampling of what they consider the most gnarly Japanese shows, but Esquire was too polite. They included the eating game where your face is on a bungee cord and marshmallows dance around your head. And they also chose the one where contestants attempt tongue-twisters.
In our part of the world, you fail and you get that buzzer sound. There, they are whacked hard in the genitals by a slapping machine.
Candid Camera, the toilet version
The worst show is the Japanese version of Candid Camera. Perfectly nice people stroll along on a sunny day and decide to use a public toilet stall, like the ones we have in Canada for construction workers, but bigger and nicer.
These unfortunate men are filmed inside the stall pulling down their pants and squatting on the toilet when suddenly the interior of the stall, toilet included, is hydraulically whisked up into public view. Some men freeze and attempt to blend in with the landscape, but the rest desperately try to get their pants back on, and you can imagine.
They're lucky. Sometimes they pull out the floor and toilet horizontally on a Jet-Ski. But these horrified toilet-goers are naked from the waist down, clinging to a pole at high speed and then nearly drowned if they overturn while trying to dress, or perhaps kill, themselves
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