Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, it’s hard to find any proof there’s ever been a Fortyhands fatality. in his 2009 book, How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid: The Straight Dope for Parents. “One night of Edward Fortyhands may seem like a fun way to spend a few hours, but it can quickly spiral out of control and land your teen in the hospital-or the morgue,” writes Joseph A. If that was the line of thinking, then it’s not surprising that the game starts off lowbrow and silly-“Here, tape these Colt 45s to my hands!”-then moves to daredevilish and hysterical-“Uh-oh, I need to go to the bathroom, like, soon ”-eventually becoming torturous, then maybe even disastrous. Hmmm… Scissors for hands… Penises for hands… Forties for hands! I like to imagine some bro watching a VHS copy of Penishands -and then having his greatest epiphany: My own absurdist belief, though, is that Fortyhands actually sprung from Edward Penishands, the follow-up satire porn about a down-on-her-luck dildo sales rep and the titular character, who, the rep is certain, will help jump-start her flagging career. We can, however, presume the game is not any older than Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s 1990 gothic romance about a Frankenstein-esque weirdo (Johnny Depp) who has scissors for hands. The true pioneers of drinking games are typically too busy toasting their own drunken genius to be bothered with historical documentation. “I’m guessing it was more like the group going, ‘Hey, we got all these 40s-and this is what we gotta do with them,’” he recalls.Ĭlearly, pinpointing the exact origins of Fortyhands is tricky. Though, in emailing with his former teammates and classmates this week, none of them think any one individual deserves full credit for Fortyhands’ invention. A member of Harvard’s rugby team, he believes they might very well have invented this great game right around the turn of the millennium. “I don’t remember if it was specifically a hazing-type thing, but my first memory of playing it was around the beginning of sophomore year,” he told me. There’s a history of drinking games created by Ivy Leaguers (see: beer pong and Dartmouth) perhaps he was the inventor? I connected with him over LinkedIn-he’s now a successful doctor-and, though he was more than happy to talk, he insisted on keeping his anonymity. “I was initially nervous, given my possession of a petite bladder,” he tells me, “but that just encouraged me to drink faster, which is the goal after all.” Still, he’s pretty sure the game hadn’t originated at his college.Ībout a week later, I stumbled upon a 2004 Harvard Crimson article telling of a student who was, at the time, hosting seniors-only Fortyhands games in his four-room suite. His first exposure to Fortyhands was in late 2001 in the basement of the Theta Chi house at the University of Michigan. I reached out to Colin Joliat, perhaps America’s foremost expert on elbow-bending tomfoolery as the brains behind the website Boozist. CollegeHumor was the early-aughts Congressional Record of higher-education hijinks-and college is so obviously where this game must have started. The site addressed Fortyhands a couple months after DrunkCyclist did by posting the mere image of a ralphing man, bottles still sadly taped to his paws, as he hugs his porcelain throne. And you can imagine the pain when you got two of these big ass bastards stuck on ya like flypaper.” ĬollegeHumor showed that the potential pitfalls could go even further than that. ’Cause a forty will get warm as a mother fucker if left unattended for to long. Just as long as you’re drinking like a mother fucker. “You can’t piss, you can’t answer the phone. The first internet mention of Fortyhands actually came three years earlier, from fledgling blogger DrunkCyclist, and detailed the inherent problems with having 40-ounce bottles restricting the use of one’s hands for a good hour.
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