I don't like those escape artists and magicians and stuntmen who tie themselves up and set themselves on fire and all that. They always hype it like it's "death-defying" and all that. But it sure never seems death-defying, or even particularly dangerous. I mean, I know that it IS dangerous to be handcuffed, straight-jacketed, locked in a trunk, set on fire, and dropped off Mount Rushmore, but somehow when I see some guy on TV whose married to a supermodel and wearing a glittery jumpsuit actually do it, I just don't get a sense of imminent danger.

I guess if I saw people trying it all the time, and most of them died, it would be a lot more impressive when one of them didn't. I'm not saying that people should all start killing themselves, or that I would enjoy seeing people die: I'm just saying, the guys who hype this stuff would have a lot easier job selling me on the "death-defying" part if they could actually show how people have died doing it. What I mean is, the "people dying" part wouldn't be so cool, but it sure would make it much cooler when someone didn't.

Another problem I have is that none of these escape artist guys seem especially personable, and in fact seem a lot more like cartoon characters. And everyone knows cartoon characters never die. If they fall off a mountain they wake up with bandages on them, and if they get caught in an explosion they turn all black, but by the next scene they're fine again. Isn't that also kind of how Evel Knevel was?

Sometimes when you watch stuff like that on TV you get the sense that it's really hard to kill someone. I'm talking about the real-life video shows and stunt things where you see cars blowing up and flipping over and going off cliffs and stuff, and then the announcer says "Amazingly, Buck walked away with just a few scratches." The first time it seems like a miracle, but by the time you've seen a hundred bajillion of them it kind of gets boring.

Maybe I have seen too much, but the thing is, I never expect escape artists and stuntmen to die, so I'm never amazed when they live. On the other hand, I figure anyone who jumps out of burning cars and off cliffs for a living has probably accepted the extreme probability that sooner or later they're going to die doing it, so I wouldn't feel too bad for him when he did, either.

People always try to make out like these guys are so brave for living on the edge like they do, and they say things like "he's got that special something in him that drives him on to do these extraordinary things!" But I don't buy that. I don't think its something he has so much as something he lacks, like common sense, a healthy fear of death, a sense of self-preservation, or a basic knowledge of the laws of physics and probability.

Maybe it is something in them, something genetic, I just don't know. But if that's so, I just don't understand how the gene has survived so long without dying out. And maybe guys who do insane crap like that are actually doing us a favor by removing themselves from the gene pool, like those Darwin Awards on the internet.

I don't know what kind of lives these guys lead, but it seems to me they spend years practicing and training just so that they can perform these insane stunts and break these ridiculous records. I'm not saying that their lives have no value, but I am saying that society wouldn't suffer as much their loss as that of, say, a doctor or fireman.

The greatest stuntman or escape artist in the world would be an ultra-bajillionaire who spent his life running a home for blind, crippled, retarded orphans with cancer. See, people would really care if he died. You would see him in a straight-jacket hanging upside down off the Chrysler Building and the announcer could really get some tension going:

"...Now, remember, folks, one false move and all those blind, crippled, retarded orphans will have no one to pay for their chemotherapy and train their seeing-eye dogs..."

In a similar way, it might help to have someone start performing these stunts who you really wouldn't mind if they died, like terrorists and serial rapists. The judge could sentence them to jump 15 buses on a motorcycle, and if they live they get 5 years, as opposed to 50 years if they don't jump. It would give a whole new meaning to plea-bargaining. You could say "15 to 20" and instead of years in prison you mean piranhas in the lake you have to swim across naked.

Another thing they always tell you is "Don't try this at home." To normal people, this warning might seem completely unnecessary, because it would never occur to a normal person to try something like that at home. But there is a certain percentage of the population who say to themselves "I could do that easy!" and then jump off the roof of their house using a bedsheet as a parachute. These days, it seems, most of these guys not only go to great lengths to recreate these stunts, but they all seem to have video cameras, too.

Something like this is probably the last thing an escape artist or stuntman wants to hear, but these stunts have gotten so commonplace that it's hard to impress people anymore. Hard to impress me, anyway. I can't imagine a stunt or escape that would impress me, unless it was something that was literally impossible, like skydiving from the space shuttle and surviving re-entry, or escaping from a sunken nuclear submarine underneath the polar ice cap, or skiing down Mount Everest. That might be impressive. But I would probably think it was all fake, and even if I didn't, you could only impress me once.