I never cease to be amazed at the things people will do for free stuff. But allow me to begin with a disclaimer: I believe that awards that are offered to incent desirable behavior or to recognize remarkable achievement are an excellent idea. However, it appears that somewhere down the line, someone discovered that if free stuff will incent people to good behavior, it would incent them to gross behavior as well. For example, look at the success of “Fear Factor.” In this TV show, individuals compete for large sums of money by eating or doing absolutely disgusting things. We, the audience, are grossed out (and engrossed, apparently) and the winner gets their free stuff. This idea is taking root elsewhere. In fact, this article covering a “Fear Factor” knockoff at QuakeCon is what got me thinking about this topic initially.
This evokes the question “why is this popular?” Perhaps it is the same motivation that makes us rubberneck by a bad accident as we stare in morbid fascination at the twisted metal and shattered glass, with a half hope, half fear that we will see a body. Maybe it’s a cultural trend. Perhaps humankind just has a strange attraction to the bizarre and disgusting. I don’t think so, though. I think it’s an attempt to recapture childhood.
Children seem to have an obsession with grossness. I can attest to this on two different counts: one, I was a child, so I know. Two, I spent this summer volunteering as a scoutmaster, and I discovered that virtually all 12-year old humor is based around grossness and “your mamma” jokes. That said, children therefore look for grossness for their entertainment. They poke dead things with sticks. They play with bugs that any normal person would be repulsed by. They laugh uproariously at bodily functions. And most importantly to my point, they try to get each other to eat gross things. Who hasn’t been offered a quarter to eat a bug as a child? I am convinced that I spent a great deal of time trying to convince my classmates that I was offering them a great deal to ingest that bloated drowned worm. I mean, a whole quarter went a long way back in those days! Now that we’re older and (supposedly) wiser, the stakes have risen to much higher amounts, but we still like to see our peers do gross things. I guess some things will never change.