Wipeout: Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society

Last night I watched a show that is a strong contender for the single stupidest thing currently on television. Forget the religious debates of Secret Life of the American Teenager, forget the absurd mishmash of genres on Defying Gravity, forget the ethically ambiguous voyeurism of Jon and Kate Plus 8. Let’s just set all of that aside and boil a show down to its most crudely entertaining element. Let’s find a form of humor that is universal, impossible to mess up, and cheap to produce. Let’s make an entire show about watching people hurt themselves, and then make fun of them while they do it. That’s right, the premise of this show is to watch “ordinary Americans” run through an impossible, absurd-looking obstacle course, and then mock them as they crash and burn. Join me as I narrate this gallery of screenshots from last night’s episode of Wipeout.

“The epic competition begins right now, to see who will emerge victorious, and who will…Wipeout.” Spoiler alert: they will all wipeout.

The most reliably cringe-inducing segment of the course is without a doubt this one, the “Big Balls.” No one ever makes it across, so the goal is to fall without hurting yourself. Few people succeed.

THREE POUNDS OF LOVE!!

Although the course produces most of the humor, the participants are also sources of entertainment. The wackiest one last night was this guy, who was trying to win the money for his bunny rabbit Yams. When he was interviewed before running the course, he shouted “LOOK AT HIM! THREE POUNDS! THREE POUNDS OF LOVE!” While on the spinner, he talked into the camera about the proper care and feeding of rabbits. (“Rabbits are lagomorphs, you know what lagomorphs means?”) Jumping across the Big Balls, he yelled, “All right Yams, I love ya!” It was…weird. And he didn’t win.

This guy came in a close second for wackiness. He did an Irish jig every time he finished a challenge.

This guy won. But after all that, did he really win? Or do we all, viewers and participants alike, end this experience a little worse off than we started? Perhaps I’m missing the point. Maybe what’s going on here is actually a form of brilliance, a focused, concentrated work of hilarious humiliation, meant to make us question our own solipsistic understanding of the universe and the essential nihilism of human existence. If that were the case, then Wipeout would have to enter the canon of great works of human achievement, a post-modern globalized vision (it was adapted from Japanese game shows) of mankind as united by the ultimate fragility of our bodies and the central cruelty of our basest selves. Maybe it reminds us that we are all equal in the face of the unmerciful, undiscriminating Big Balls.

But I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it’s just awful.