Are there any documented accounts of extremely wealthy people ‘hiring’ people to publically disgrace themselves?
It would appear to me that the temptation to do so would be very strong, since several thousand dollars would be a sufficient sum of money to induce your average working person into humiliating himself, but it would only be the equivalent of a few dollars to a billionaire.
For example, if you were a billionaire you could go around offering people $100,000 to publically wet their pants, or to wear a diaper in public, or to pick up a golf ball off of a table and deposit it in a waste basket across the room by clenching it between their butt-cheeks. Has anyone ever done anything like this?
In Toronto, a millionare in the '30s plunked down in his will a big reward for the woman who had the most babies over a 10-year period. Does that count?
They took advantage of several homeless people by offering them money (and not even that much.) They kept stringing them along to do more and more outrageous and humiliating things. Some of the guys have gone to the hospital for the things they made them do.
They got in some trouble over it, too, as the two “bums” from the first video sued them, I think. I don’t know how that turned out.
I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of this being a great temptation. Coercing people into humiliating themselves doesn’t even make the top thousand in the list of things I’m going to do when I win the lottery.
This is tangential, but this was the theme of the satirical book by Terry Southern and subsequent movie The Magic Christian, starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.
No cite for this one; the source is the ever-reliable Mr. FOAF.
John Byrne, the popular and prolific comic book virtuoso, started making serious money in the early 80s and unsurprisingly, it went right to his head. One day, to make a point to a friend he was walking through Manhattan with, he offered a complete stranger $10K to cut off all his hair on the spot. Hirsute Stranger did it.
RealityChuck nailed it in one, but I would second his theme - most of the reality shows on TV are exactly what the OP is looking for. Fear Factor, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, dating shows, etc.
This reminds me of one of the lousiest “Simpsons” episodes ever, where Mr. Burns hires Homer to be his “prank monkey.” The B-story of the episode – Smithers’ production of his Malibu Stacy musical – looked far more interesting, but unfortunately we got just a few snippets.
It puzzled me too at first, but then I suspected the OP meant that it could be a great temptation for other people to humiliate themselves for some money.
Does it have to be a millionaire? Hell, I’ll deposit $10 in a PayPal account to the first person here who does something humiliating in a photo, and posts it online so that we can see it. Of course, I’ll have to listen to ideas here, and it has to include some type of authentication in the photo so we know you didn’t just download something from steakandcheese.com.
That’s the way I’d go if I was a billionaire. Why waste your money paying people to wet their pants, when you could be using it to convince playmates to have sex with you?
