It was thrilling to see the young gentleman be nearly pricked repeatedly by Dr. Funke.
It might seem slightly less incompetent if not for the repeated failure to actually hit the targets, or even get the knives to stick in the wood. Some of the comments suggest that they are using entirely the wrong kind of knives, which seems believable.
Also noteworthy is that in the final seconds, they are apparently trying to clean the blood off the stage with their shoes.
I though the whole thrill of every hair-raising knife throwing performance was the ‘nearly ending in death’ part.
When MythBusters Live came through town recently, they had a small segment on knife-throwing. I admit that I personally don’t know otherwise, but maybe their comments are informative here:
Apparently throwing a knife end-over-end and sticking it into wood is very difficult even for the skilled. The distances cannot be correctly eye-balled, and you usually hit with the wrong part of the knife. When knife throwers meet for competition, they actually have about half an hour of calibration throwing, just to let them feel out the distance so that they can ultimately be tested on accuracy. On a stage like this the marks would have to be placed and practiced just so, even with skilled thrower.
So hitting but not sticking, and even hitting with the wrong part of the knife are expected to some degree. Part of the show of a knife-throwing demonstration is that the calibration is done before hand, such that the audience is paying attention to something else. Hitting the human is, of course, never part of the act; it’s just incompetence.
I wonder just how sharp the knife edges are and if the uniforms are made of cut resistant fabric.
My rational mind assumes that the mortal danger in such acts is mostly illusory. That is, they’re doing something which looks incredibly dangerous, but in fact they have fixed the situation or practiced the technique to the point that they’re not especially worried about the odds.
If someone was actually risking likely death just to give me a thrill (especially if it’s just the thrill of seeing someone gamble with their life) that would be troubling, not exciting. This video is definitely right on the edge 
Now THAT’S entertainment.
[Deleted by popular request 
]
Man, these marching band hazing rituals are really getting out of control!
The danger is entirely real. Its just not MORTAL danger. Its damn hard to kill somebody with a knife, much less one that it thrown. But getting stabbed in the face if somebody of borderline competence is throwing a knife at a mellon mounted above your head? Totally could happen.
Not if you’re John Locke.
He never misses!
There is no amount of Xanax in the world that could make me as calm as this young man appears to be.
Man! Enough vodka can make you sit still for anything.
I have a friend who I’ve seen stick 10/10 countless times using any knife. The thing with distance is slightly true, but not in the context of this video. The number of rotations is directly related to the distance you’er throwing from: the longer the distance the more spins you need. You get a feel for the distance at which you should be standing and how many rotations you need to add and since he could choose where to stand.
There are throwing-specific knives which are basically just sharpened pieces of carefully weighted steel, but the closer to perfectly balanced the better - you need the midpoint to be the centre of balance to more easily predict the spins but as I said I’ve seen a friend hit 10/10 tree times in a row with the cheapest steak knives money can buy which featured wooden handles and thin blades (obviously not properly weighted).
We got him some proper throwing knives and a throwing axe (yes, they’re a thing) and the real advantage of the specifically-designed ones is that they’re designed to have a large ‘strike zone’ - i.e. designed so that you can really fuck up and it’ll still stick in. The other advantage is that, because you’re throwing a hunk of metal at speed, if you hit handle-side in the knife often sticks anyway.
Each to their own but the ones with string around the handle are stupid imo because the string eventually comes unwound, it interferes with the aerodynamics of the spin and, in the case of knives, you’re holding it by the blade 50% of the time because you sometimes need half a spin to make the chosen distance properly.
Also: who’s been getting their material off failblog BB??? 
Try 4 milligrams.
Duh. Source: D&D.
There was something very strange about his reaction. At first I also thought it was drug-induced (alcohol would make him unable to stand without wavering), but there was a tiny smirk at one point that made me wonder if instead he was a depressed fatalist who didn’t value his life and assumed one day, maybe this day, would be the one when he died by knife.
