Ways to Die #1000: Suicide

by shionline

Channel 8, in Israeli cables, is the sciency-cultury channel, and the only one there is. When I was just a little girl, it aired opera and ballet on the weekend, and I watched A Street Scene, Bluebeard’s Castle, and Howard Hanson’s Nymphs and Satyr. These days, it mainly airs usually excellent BBC documentaries, and even QI, a program that helped me through a very bad year of my life.

Today, after a sensitive documentary about a teenage boy, who was adopted after his parents abandoned him because of a genetic deformity, channel 8 aired an episode of 1000 Ways to Die. It was an episode from season three, which means there are more of them, and I already want to die.

I was vaguely familiar with this show from clips, and from my mom being a bit hysterical about some of the situations she’s watched on it, but boy, was I unprepared for what I had in store. In general, I have no issue with silly deaths, or The Darwin Awards. Silly deaths are silly, and the gene pool clearly does need some chlorine now and then. What I clearly wasn’t ready for, was just how mean-spirited it can become.

The main premise of 1000 Ways to Die, is that someone, who is not like you, has done something stupid. They reenact it with some aspiring actors, and the narrator makes fun of them. Then there’s a pun that makes you cringe your face off. To me, after I reinstalled my face, the most horrible thing was seeing how each story is clearly narrated and structured to make me feel as though these people clearly deserved to die. They deserved to die not only because they were bad people, in some stories, but because they acted outside the norm.

A man who likes being treated like a baby, who is called a freak by the narrator, died in a household accident. This is okay, because his sexual preferences weren’t like yours. While his wife played along with his perversion, she won’t cry for him. She probably feels released, right? That fat guy didn’t tip the woman who saved his life, so he went into cardiac arrest. The feminist… The story about the feminist activist nearly made me cry.

A radical feminist activist, shown as pretty violent, has just finished a conference about attacking men’s privates, a favorite pastime of mine. They interview a feminist during the segment, and the subtitles for her read ‘BLAH…BLAH…BLAH’, because that clearly doesn’t make me want to go and cut the first penis-bearer I see on the street, right? Those kooky feminists. Said radical feminist is not only masturbating in her hotel room with a vibrator, but she’s also a lesbian. She dies. Children, please highlight the number of perversions from society this story presents in order for us to be glad a woman is dead, and send it to the editor. The winners will receive a bachelor’s in gender studies.

And this thing got made. This thing has three seasons, and possibly more. They got actors to play in it. They got people who agreed to be interviewed. They got a narrator. They hired someone whose job was to write bad puns about dead people. I can’t, for my own life, fathom how can anyone watch this without losing all faith in humankind, and all will to live.

I’ve never had to deal very much with death, but I have given mine a lot of thought. This happens, when you go through periods of depression. I served in the IDF, and would sometimes sit and think about committing suicide in the toilet, like any other depressed soldier, but one of the things that stopped me, apart from reciting jokes from QI, was that our toilets were absolutely disgusting. It’s nice to know that if, in service, I were found face-down in a pool of diarrhea, I can count on TV to make it as entertaining as possible, so my loved ones won’t have to cry.