This week, YouTuber Noah Maloney will complete his second month of eating a printed-out photograph of actor Jason Segel every day, in hopes that Segel will eat a photo of him. Although Segel has yet to publicly acknowledge the dare, and Maloney says he nearly choked to death on a photo of the actor’s face, Maloney told the Daily Dot he has no intention of stopping.
Maloney, who runs the YouTube account Dog Shirt, started #EatMyFaceSegel in February, and it hasn’t changed much over the course of nearly 60 videos.
Each one shows him choking down a different photo of Segel—sometimes dry, sometimes washed down with another food or beverage—and ends with the line “Hi Jason!” In one entry, he wrapped the photo around a pickle. It didn’t seem to help.
I asked Maloney if he’s sick of the Eating Jason Segel’s Face lifestyle, and he readily admits that he is. Eating a piece of paper every day is as bad as it sounds.
“It takes up a lot of our lives now,” he wrote, “even though it’s such a simple task, it seems like such a drag and big deal out of my day every day. It’s not hard to keep going, it’s just boring.”
Sometimes there’s excitement, but it’s not the good kind—like Segel finally responding to the stunt. It’s the bad kind—like almost dying.
“I almost died last week from doing it and I had never been more scared in my life,” Maloney wrote.
“I dunked a whole photo into a beer and tried to do it in one big ball/swallow and it lodged in my throat… I tried to get it down with more beer but it was stuck and there’s was 15 seconds where I came to terms with the fact that that was how I would go… Jason Segel would have killed me. But then I threw up the ball of paper and beer onto my friend and ate it after so it’s all good.”
Maloney suspects Jason Segel knows about the project, and that he’s choosing to ignore it for now.
“There’s no way he doesn’t know which makes it all more clear he probably won’t do it,” he wrote, “His sister tweeted about it but soon after deleted the tweets.”
Segel had an opportunity to talk to Jimmy Fallon about the project on March 29, when he did a little monologue about how he handles fans who ask for selfies. He said he makes a “walking video” instead—he grabs the fan’s phone and starts walking, silently. If he were ever going to discuss the man who eats his photo every day, that would have been the time. He didn’t go for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj0j3sHtVdM
“THEY COULD HAVE JUST ENDED IT SO EASILY!” Maloney lamented.
Despite the lack of results, the sheer boredom of eating a Segel photo every day, and the declining views—the first video has 700,000 views now, and the latest entries only have 4,000—Maloney has no intention of stopping the project.
“We don’t really know what’s going to happen or how long we will keep going but it’ll be a while,” he wrote. “Probably have to do something crazy to get him into it but I’m not sure. As of now, we don’t know when it’ll stop, so for the time being we will just [stick] with not stopping at all.”
Godspeed, you weird Segel-eater. Try not to choke yourself.