Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
Viral Aussie comedy stunt duo Marty and Michael have been burned alive, shot by air cannons and whacked with squash balls, but there’s one prank that haunts them above all.
The Queensland-based mates have amassed millions of social followers for their willingness to test a human’s pain threshold through various elements and instruments, often using each other as literal whipping boys.
“A lot of the time it’s superficial wounds. We’ve had a few scares with ruptured organs but we sort of know the limits with what we can be hit with — you’ve normally got about 10 seconds to a minute of agony, and then it subsides,” Michael told PerthNow.
Last year the new father was inspired to replicate the feats of the Asian palm civet, an animal native to Bali known for ingesting coffee beans and pooping them out as the raw ingredient of a popular delicacy labelled Kopi Luwak.
However, what he only learnt later was that the animal consumes the berry before it becomes a coffee bean. And, of course, his intestines are not built the same way.
“I just swallowed the raw beans and then next minute I clogged my whole digestive system, and the doctor basically said, ‘Best case scenario, you have a stoma bag, worst case, you die’,” Michael recalled.
“And it was just a week of agony. I couldn’t pass them and eventually had to do surgery, and each day I had a huge or traumatic event.”
Feeling for his mate, Marty said the predicament had doctors stumped.
“They said, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’, so there’s no handbook on how to treat it,” he added.
“It was pretty scary there for a while. But then after Marty got out, some university in Europe or something reached out. They wanted to use Michael’s case as a study to teach their medical students, so that was pretty cool.”
The pair’s desire to both shock and entertain the public began upon filming social experiments around 2014 for their friends’ start up production company.
Despite getting “banned from all the universities in Brisbane”, the hosts of the Marty & Michael Fully Actual podcast felt they’d landed on something special and decided to lean further into it.
However, the fuse was lit even earlier as high school students, with an admiration for stunt comedy legends Jackass pushing the duo to film funny skits with friends.
In a full circle moment, Marty and Michael travelled to the US earlier this year where they joined their American heroes on a promotional tour surrounding the release of their final feature film, Jackass: Best and Last.
“They’re not actors. So what you see in the movies is what they’re like in real life,” Marty said.
Admittedly “nervous” before collaborating with the likes of Johnny Knoxville, their encounter resulted in Marty getting a “tramp stamp” pointing to his buttocks at the hands of Steve-O.
While the Jackass film chapter is sadly closing, the Aussies feel they’ve still got long careers ahead of them.
Asked if they harboured another dream collaboration, or ideal candidate to be whacked by in the name of content, the pair offered wildly different responses.
“Liam Gallagher, but it’d be so hard to leave him. Once I see him, I think sort of that’d be it. I’d just be like, ‘Oh, can I come home with you?’” Michael joked.
Keeping on the British theme, Marty opted for a couple of figures less likely to leave scars.
“King Charles? Just because it’d be so weird to see him hitting something and he wouldn’t be able to hit that hard,” Marty teased.
“Or someone really old, like David Attenborough. That’s who I’d want to hit me.”
