That's an old mountain lion.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yes, the mountain may well have been old, but I think the lion was young.

I basically agree with "AGN Fuel".

The ignorance required for a Award is so far beyond "normal ignorance", anyone achieving it deserves to be ridiculed.

The ignorance required for a Award is so far beyond "normal ignorance", anyone achieving it deserves to be ridiculed.



The idiot with his foot on fire, So he sprays it with lighter fuel(see Darwin wannabes) is a perfect representation.

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about: Jayutah


I are Learnding.

Robert Heinlein, in "Stranger from a strange land", proposes that all humour is about pain, in one way or other. It's quite a compelling idea.

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

It's also an overgeneralization, IMO. How about simple things like a fart joke or a goofy-sounding word? Or just making funny faces at a baby? Humor is more often about the unexpected or anomalous than pain per se.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I would put it that humor is about the absurd.

Whether it be someone tripping and falling with their feet flying in the air, making a goofy face or a kid setting his pants on fire for some mysterious God-only-knows reason...

We laugh at absurdity.

That is why Gary Larson will always be famous. Or infamous.

some of the funniest- and most dangerous- things i've ever seen happen were proceeded by the line "hey, hold my beer", and "you got your video camera with you", and lastly, the famous "did you get that"(referring to the other drunk trying to run the camera)..
and i'm not talking about someone trying make a "sweet jump" on a bike like Napoleon Dynamite here- i'm talking "alcohol and explosives" or "alcohol, junky 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass with no seat belts but we have ratchet straps so lets strap Andy in and see if 10 of us can roll it over" kind of funny.. of course, once that was over and Andy was safely removed from the car and reunited with his frosty beverage, it was on to "hey, let's push the car into the bonfire", followed by "hey, i think i had half a tank of gas in it yet" funny..

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

This is worth repeating, as I do believe it is the crux of the answer to the OP's question.

The key to finding these hijinks funny is that the victims should have known better. They were being more irresponsible than unintelligent.

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Hi, The point of this laugh is to wake up a few....maybe only a few of the potential jackjasses out there who think daring and stupid risks are really cool
and will surely get a laugh.....that sort of mentality, along with making at least a few of them "THINK" before they do dangerous things.
If it saves a few people and perhaps stirs a few into thinking at all....
and sets them on a different path....well....it will have been worth while.
Think of the savings at the ER.
Best regards, Dan

If I understand the Darwin Awards, the qualifications require the performance of some activity that is really stupid, by someone who is willfully ignorant of its consequences, that results in the severe injury or demise of the person.

The key here is the term "willfully ignorant". Anyone who has the means to determine that what they're about to do is stupid, dangerous, and potentially lethal, but then ignores all that information and goes ahead and experiences the consequences, deserves to be laughed at, with a pitiful laugh.

Plus a hope that they never dove into even the shallow end of the gene pool.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

In my opinion, they are separate things.
Fart jokes, puns and slapstick may be funny, but ithey have nothing to do with humour.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Yes, me too.

Actually, there is something interesting about those awards. Why do young people do things like that? I think that ironically, there is probably a Darwinian advantage somewhere to the kind of risk taking that we do when young. I'm just speculating here, but I've heard that male birds have bright plumage because it gives a message to females: I have all these bright feathers, but I'm so darned strong that I don't get eaten! You should have my children. That may be part of it.

Another thing is that we are evolutionarily predators of a type, and predators have to take risks to get food. Lions risk getting broken bones from angry prey, and I've heard something interesting, that one leading cause of death in cheetahs is colliding with things (like stones or sticks in the ground) while chasing prey.

So maybe those foolish people are actually doing something that has been instilled into our species by evolution!

And also, I do agree with Danburger that it is kind of cruel to make fun of others' misfortune. It's something many of us do though. Just look at the popularity of "bloopers".

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As above, so below

Sort of reviving this thread, but I was watching a nature show, and apparently when zebras cross a river, the young males stay on the outside, where they are most vulnerable, and kick away the crocodiles. The females and children stay on the inside.

Now the interesting thing is, I doubt that zebras have meetings beforehand to decide who will be on the inside and who on the outside. So how do the males decide to be in the most vulnerable position? Somehow I doubt that it is out of a sense of responsibility. Maybe by evolution, the males are created to be thrill seekers. So they become interested in the crocodiles, and stay to the outside. And for each male zebra, this is a dangerous gamble, but as long as some survive they can make children with the remaining females. So it's not really an evolutionary problem for a number of males to be lost, as long as the males as a whole protect the females. Of course, for each individual male this is a gamble, because his genes may be lost, but the alternative is the possible destruction of the species as a whole, which is bad for everybody. Hence, these genes persist.

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As above, so below

Anyone who sees life as anything other that entertainment is missing the point - George Carlin

I doubt herd behavior in zebras or most other animals is related to thrill seeking but instead is most likely a survival strategy. One bit of flying folklore is that you can tell the direction of surface winds by looking at the direction cows face. The majority of them will be facing downwind. This probably allows them to see a predator that might be trying to sneek up on the herd from downwind. The herd can then close ranks to protect the calves. Old time pilots sometimes refered to cows as "4 legged wind socks".

In many species, only the dominant male gets to breed. Younger males might be protecting the herd as a means of getting stronger so they can make their own claim for dominence.

While I don't think the second is all that funny, it does show a real Darwin Award contender;

There is a big difference between someone who was killed while being mugged and someone who kills themselves attempting to use a gun to remove an absessed tooth...true story!

That's a good point. I suppose that the younger males, standing on the outside, may be competing to be seen as strong. But in a sense, I think that this might be seen as thrill-seeking behavior in humans. It may be, for example, that young males who do stupid things like driving a BMW off the end of a runway (thinking of another thread here) are actually seen as strong by young women, and get a better chance to breed (as long as they survive).

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As above, so below

Another name for that is "small head thinking."

Every man has two heads. You're bound to get into trouble if you go through life thinking with the small one.