Dare Devil Facts

A dare devil is a person to takes part in dangerous activities, sometimes for their own amusement (such as bungee jumping, sky diving), but more often than not as a way to make a living while entertaining an audience. Magician Harry Houdini is perhaps one of the best known daredevils of all time, but there are other famous contemporary performers that have earned the title of daredevils, including Evel Knievel and his son Robbie, as well as dare devil Johnny Knoxville and his Jackass crew. Read more about daredevils here on Sickandmad.com

Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (1874), was a small time card magician until he met Martin Beck, a theater impresario, in 1899. Beck advised Houdini to focus in escape acts after witnessing his handcuffs routine. Some of his memorable escapes include the mirror handcuff challenge, the milk can escape, the Chinese water torture cell and the suspended straitjacket escape. However, the two feats that gave him his status as dare devil were probably the overboard box escape and the buried alive stunt. In the former, he would escaped from nailed and rope box that was lowered into New York's East River. The latter saw several variations, but only one was near fatal, when he was buried six feet deep in a pit of earth, in Santa Ana, California, in 1917. He even called for help and fell unconscious after his assistants pulled him form what could have been, literally, his early grave.

Robert Craig Knievel, better known as Evel Knievel, was born in 1938 in Montana. Before becoming a motorcycle dare devil, he took part in rodeos and ski jumping events, and found work as an insurance salesman. He started jumping full time in 1966, and attempted his last jump in 1980 in Puerto Rico, although it did not come to fruition. A few of the notable objects that he jumped (or tried to jump) over include rattlesnakes, pick up trucks, a speeding motorcycle, an increasing number of cars (up to sixteen) and trucks (up to thirteen), the Snake River Canyon, fourteen buses and thirteen sharks. Some of those jumps fell short, but even the successful ones yielded minor to severe injuries, such as a sprained ankle, broken arm, broken ribs, concussions, broken hip, crushed pelvis, broken leg, fractured foot, broken shoulder, broken collarbone, fractured vertebrae, broken hand, bruised kidneys, and a 29-day coma. As far as daredevils go, this is definitely a shoo in for Sickandmad.com

A Roger Alan Wade song says, “if you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.” That may very well be the motto of Philip John Clapp, better known as Johnny Knoxville, of MTV's Jackass fame. Some of the stunts that Knoxville and his dare devil friends have been involved with include indoor skiing, the anaconda ball pit, human bowling, the wheelchair rocket, alligator tightrope, human branding, the bungee-wedgie, leech eye, and many other gut-wrenching, stomach-turning feats seen both on TV and feature films, inspiring legions of wannabe daredevils.