Article Lead Image

Urine-drinking meme man is a hit

Reddit gets to know the star of Man vs. Wild, perhaps best known on the Internet for drinking his own pee.

 

Kevin Morris

Streaming

Posted on Sep 13, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 2:48 am CDT

The star of the Internet’s favorite urine-drinking image meme has bared it all on Reddit.

Bear Grylls, explorer, Mt. Everest climber, and host of The Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild show, invited users of the social news site to “ask him anything” earlier this afternoon.

Grylls has a special place in Reddit’s heart. On Man vs. Wild, he demonstrates the ins and outs of surviving in some of the most hostile places on earth, usually with nothing more than some flint and tinder and a knife (and a camera crew).

He also sometimes (OK, frequently and gratuitously) drinks his own urine. You know, to stay hydrated.

That proclivity for pee turned Grylls into the star of his own image meme, which Internet culture site Know Your Meme helpfully calls the “Better Drink My Own Piss” meme. As that site observes, the point is to poke fun “at all sorts of ridiculous and oftentimes unnecessary tasks that Mr. Grylls will put himself up to in order to ‘survive’ in nature.”

Back in May, Grylls responded to the jokes on his Twitter account.

“In honour of all your @replies about pee drinking,” he wrote, attaching a picture that showed him drinking from a tea cup. “Am on vacation in LA. Looks like I’ll have to drink my own pee!”

That post spread to Reddit, where it hit the site’s front page and spawned an AMA request (“ask me anything”).

In today’s question and answer session on Reddit, Grylls mostly responded with short video clips. He even answered the question on everyone’s mind: Does he ever drink his own piss for fun?

“Um, no!” Grylls replied.

He also regaled redditors with tales of his worst-ever meal on the show.

“Probably raw goat’s testicles,” Grylls said. “Though yak eyeballs were bad. And camel intestinal fluids was very bad.”

Share this article
*First Published: Sep 13, 2011, 6:13 pm CDT