What are the Darwin Awards?
The Darwin Awards "salute the improvement of
the human genome by honoring those who
accidentally remove themselves from it…."
This tongue-in-cheek "award" is given to people who show astoundingly stupid judgement, have caused one’s own demise, are dead or rendered sterile, are free of mental defect and of legal driving age, and have a verifiable story that qualifies the person for the award.Recipients include people like the catholic priest who attempted to set a record for a clustered balloon flight. He strapped himself to a lawn chair and floated for 19 hours with a bunch of helium balloons but killed himeself in the process. –
The Darwin Awards are "joke" awards named after Charles Darwin. The author of the Darwin Awards books, Wendy Northcutt, states it like this … "The Awards honor people who ensure the long-term survival of the human race by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." Basically these are given to people who caused their own death by some idiotic or foolish action. I read that the Darwin Awards have appeared annually since 1991. (I used to get them in my email back in the early nineties). Wendy Northcutt lists the award winners and runner ups going back to 1995 here – http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/. According to wikipedia though the Awards have actually circulated since 1985 as emails and Usenet group discussions; supposedly the Google Usenet archive records two early mentions of Darwin Awards, 7 August 1985 Vending Machine Tipover[2] and 7 December 1990 JATO Rocket Car urban legend (I actually remember getting this email back then. Damn, I thought that was a real one). The JATO legend was widely distributed via emails from 1995–97.
The primary requirement Northcutt lists is that a candidate must have rendered themselves unable to reproduce by either dying or becoming sterile. Here are the 5 requirements:
- Inability to reproduce. Nominee must be dead or rendered sterile.
- Astoundingly stupid judgment.
- Self-selection
- Maturity
- Veracity
The popularity of the Darwin Awards led to a film Written and directed by Finn Taylor, with the same "Darwin Awards" name which premiered January 25, 2006, at the Sundance Film Festival. The film featured mostly incidents which were actually urban legend like the JATO Rocket which is how the film starts. (Some of these urban legend awards are technically grandfathered into the Darwin Awards before the established guideline of veracity started. Here is the dvd site here. http://darwinawardsdvd.com/
