I feel like this lives in my head rent free. At least once a month I’II think about it and how mad it was… just this guy, hanging around in the sky doing nothing for 44 days but drinking water.

I had so many questions like where did he go to the loo, and why the fuck was he doing it?

I remember people throwing eggs at him in the box. I also remember it being this huge news story. I wasn’t even a teenager at the time, but I still remember it so vividly.

by ChiaKmc

39 comments

  3. The best bit was when someone attached a cheeseburger to a remote control helicopter and flew it around the box.

  4. I remember that shortly afterwards Wayne Rooney failed to live up to his hype in the World Cup or Euros and somebody commented that he’d broken David Blaine’s record for doing fuck all in a box.

  5. The man is an illusionist. Was it really 44 days?
    *Dun-Dun-Duhhhhhh!*

  6. It makes me envious.

    Not due to some ascetic ideals or feats of endurance, but because with my IBS I can barely go 3 hours without needing to shit violently.

    You put me in that box, and 5 days in it’d be like I was floating in fucking Dagobah.

  7. I remember hoping he fell in and drowned. The guy is such a fucking tit!

  9. If he’d done it nowadays, there would be people livestreaming themselves tormenting him.

  11. It really popularised those little lipstick lazers.

    Londoners basically tortured an american in a box for a month, as a nation we came together in a common cause, it was beautiful

  14. The highlight of my 6th form trip to London was witnessing him floating there and then reading all the stories of him being mocked by the public

  15. His Rogan podcast was quite interesting.

    He asked if Joe wanted to do a magic trick and then had him poke a metal needle through the palm of his hand. There was no trick. He just stuck a needle through his palm in a certain spot that didn’t hit anything.

    Joe was clearly insanely uncomfortable about it

    And then later on he alluded to the fact that he’d spent so many hours rolling dice and memorizing how they land and feel that he could reliably get a dice to land how he wanted it to. Which sounds like complete utter bollocks, but then you remember he did shit like sit in a box for 44 days and can stick a needle through his hand.

  16. I do. Magic Dave had done a thing where he stood on a pillar or something for ages in America and everyone in the crowd interviewed by the news folk seemed very impressed. Here, people were looking at him like he was a twat and trying to piss in his water supply. It was one of the few times in my life I’ve felt truly proud to be British.

  17. I remember people hitting golf balls at him on the news and trying to blind him with laser pens. It was the most British reaction to an American being a twat.

  18. No, but only because I’m too busy randomly thinking about the Roman Empire.

  19. I remember visiting London at the time, happening to walk past and spending a pleasant 15 mins joining the crowd below geering and booing.

    Fun times

  21. I remember thinking that they could be feeding him through the tube with sugar and amino acids. Like they do in hospital.

  22. I remember a feeling of disappointment after finding out how big the box was, I assumed he was going to have squeezed himself into a tiny box like a contortionist for all that time.

    I know others felt the same, one person I knew saying words to the effect of “I thought his head would be up his arse!”

  23. The thing I remember most from this was watching him in his box live on the news before school. During the broadcast, someone threw a burger or something at his glass box. It woke him up and he just watched it as it slowly slid down the side. Bloke must have been starving at that point. For some reason, it made me laugh at the time. The British public are something else.

  25. Me and Mrs Dozzell were sightseeing in London and wandered along to Tower Bridge, forgot he would be there. I remember standing there looking up at the box when someone shouted to him “why don’t you just fuck off?!”.

    It was a beautiful moment.

  26. Does you reminding me of this make it random? Probably not, but I frequented Sam Smith’s pubs at the time and we called the lager in them Man in the box.

  29. Not long before the perspex box thing, he’d done been in a sort of igloo in New York and all these divvy Americans seemed to be in awe of him like he was some sort of wizard. Then he came to England and underestimated our raw cynicism. That, and we don’t like pretentious pricks.

  30. Obligatory ‘this is my Roman empire’ response. But genuinely, I do think about this more often than I imagine is normal

  31. Yes all the time. It makes me proud to be British the way the public reacted to this. Pelting him with McDs was truly fantastic.

  35. He’s done a bunch of weird shit and each time you could see it taking its toll on him, to the point he’s pretty much zombified now

  38. Didn’t Dizzee Rascal shoot a music video on the Thames as well during this.

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