Despite media coverage, Japanese TV tends to lean towards the tame. You’ve got your History Channel-type stuff, your basic daytime dramas, your variety shows that are invariably focused on people eating food and the reactions of people watching said people eat food (spoiler: it’s delicious). You’ve got your movie re-runs and your weather forecasts.
But then, sometimes, you’ve got stuff like this: a man willingly, inexplicably letting a machine paddle him in the family jewels over and over again for what appears to be no reason at all.
For reasons that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain or fathom, the Japanese television show Ame Talk, recently featured a segment in which a man used what appears to be a bizarre exercise machine that swings foot-level paddles that alternate with a head-level paddle, thus forcing the user to jump and duck in rapid succession. Mistime a jump or screw up the rhythm and the machine will deliver a stinging but ultimately painless blow to your shins or face.
Unless, of course, you’re this guy. Because Three Stooges-style slapstick is still considered comedy gold in Japan, this poor sucker—who appears to be a small-time comedian—willfully subjects his nards to the mechanical punishment of this exercise machine, as he is seemingly knocked over by the whirring monstrosity and forced to submit to a brutal nut-slapping while the studio audience and the show’s hosts laugh hysterically at his misfortune.
On even mildly scrupulous viewing, it’s obvious the guy has just decided to lie down and take a ball-whacking on purpose, though, leading many foreign viewers (especially those in Taiwan, where the video has gone viral) to openly wonder why this type of stuff seems to find its way onto Japanese television so often. Attempting to understand the cultural and psychological reasons for this phenomenon is tempting madness, however, so let’s just go ahead and bask in the beautiful insanity of a man lying perfectly still while a machine paddles his balls for the amusement of millions.
Source: Yurukuyaru
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons