Tarrare, the Hungriest Man in History

**Tarrare, the Hungriest Man in History** is the 42nd episode in total.

## Plot

Sam talks about Tarrare, a French showman and soldier noted for his unusual eating habits. Among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people, mutilated and devoured stray animals, and went to extreme lenghts to, often unsuccesfully, satisfy his inhuman hunger.

## Transcript

***(INTRO/TITLE CARD)***

SAM: Hey kids. I think we can all agree that there are a few pastimes more grotesque than competitiv­e-eating.

(Two men are crouching over tables decked out in hotdogs in a gymnasium, cramming several of the sausages into their mouths in a very non-suggestive manner.)

**SAM**: The concept of a bunch of guys pushing their anatomy to its limits just for sport leaves a bad taste in my mouth, in more ways than one. But imagine if these men didn't adopt this habit just for fun. Imagine if some gross biological error forced them to eat like this for their entire life. Introducing: Tararre.

**SAM**: He was born in France around 1772 to a poor farming family. It's said that his appetite was so voracious that by his teens, Tarrare could eat an entire quarter of a cow carcass in a single day. You'd think he'd be like mega obese but no he only weighed a hundred pounds by age 17. However there was still a few things that stood out about Tarrare. Appearance­-wise, for one, he had a huge stretched out mouth with horribly stained teeth he could reportedly fit 12 eggs in his cheeks at once, much like a chipmunk keeping its chipmunk eggs warm. Additional­ly, when Tarrare was full he'd get a crazy Octomom gut going and any other time he'd have a huge flap of stretched out skin hanging around his waist. He also stank to high hell even by 18th century French peasant standards. He was described as reeking, quote: "to such adegree that he could not be endured within the distance of 20 paces". Sobetween all this and is horrendous outhouse flooding dumps his family had had enough.

(Rural farmhouse with Tarrare's parents and Tarrare standing outside)

**TARRARE'S MOTHER**: All right you're eating us out of house and home here. You gotta go, man!

**TARRARE**: \*dog-like whimpering\*

**TARRARE'S MOTHER**: You heard me. Kick bricks, froggy.

(Two guys are at an computer, watching the video)

**BROWN-HAIRED GUY**: Wow, he just called a French person a frog! That's so racist.

**BLOND GUY**: No it's not they're all French. The guy just looks like a frog is all.

**BROWN-HAIRED GUY**: Oh. Well, too late, I'm already offended.

**SAM**: That's fair. Dislike.

(Screenshot of the like-dislike counter of "It's Everyday, Bro", with around 1.5 billion views, with a 840 thousand likes vs. 7.3 million dislikes ratio, one by Sam himself.)

**SAM**: After leaving home, Tarrare was forced to beg and steal,

(Tarrare, with a crazed expression on his face, threatens a startled man with a goat on a leash at knifepoint)

**SAM**: just to satisfy his gargantuan appetite.

(Tarrare eats the goat, leash and all, while the man watches in horror)

**SAM**: Inevitably, people began to take notice of him and eventually he landed a job as a street performer in Paris. People would hand Tarrare entire baskets of apples, eggs, and even wine corks and watch in delight as he horked him down without the slightest hesitation.

(Tarrare gets a bucket full of said items in a brown sludge handed to him by a woman, who watches, in said delight, as he gulps the mixture with his gargantuan maw)

**SAM**: Normally this went off without a hitch, except for one time, when he suffered a "severe intestinal blockage". Fortunatel­y, the crowd was kind enough to carry him to the hospital, where he was treated with the strongest laxatives the 18th century had to offer.

**SAM**: I would draw what happened next but it would probably get my channel deleted, so let's just picture it for a few moments,

(Sam closes his eyes for several seconds, then squirms at the described thought)

**SAM**: Ugh. Moving on.

**SAM**: Cut to the year 1795. This marks the beginning of the War of the First Coalition. Ever heard of it? Me neither. Who was in it? Fucking everyone.

(Screenshot of the Wikipedia article to the War of the First Coalition. To put it briefly, basically the entirety of all signifcant Western and Central European empires were involved in a loosely-affiliated mish-mash of alliances that change drastically throughout the war)

**SAM**: Anyway, Tarrare decided to enlist in the war. After all, maybe that profound emptiness he was feeling was just a lack of purpose in life.

(Tarrare signs a document while looking up at the sunshine in the sky with a glimmer of hope in his eyes)

**SAM**: Turns out, nah, he really was just psychotically hungry.

**SAM**: Even after being granted quadruple rations, Tarrare would still be digging through the trash pile whenever he got the chance. After suffering extreme exhaustion, he was sent off to the military hospital in \*bad French accent\* SULZ-HOH-RAHN (Soultz-Haut-Rhin). The staff they were so dumbfounde­d by the man's abilities, that they decided to keep him there to run a few experiment­s, the first of which involved putting Tarrare in a room with a meal prepared for 15 people.

(Tarrare stands in a room with a number of meals of glazed hams, tin pies, and gruel on a table, ostensibly prepared for 15 people)

**SAM**: Naturally he ate the entire thing and immediatel­y fell asleep.

(Tarrare lies asleep on the table, his gut heavily distended, like he ate not only the food, but the plates, cutlery and the 15 people it was meant for.)

**SAM**: Next they presented him with a raw eel. In response Tarrare crushed the eel'sskull between his teeth before slurping down the entire creature in one go. Now this is hair clenchingly horrifying for a couple of reasons. Firstly, *he put a whole freakin' eel in his stomach*. But secondly, there had to be some point during digestion where the meat was gone, but the bone still remained. Now, for those of you who don't know an eel skeleton looks like this.

(Sam pulls up a photo of an eel skeleton.)

**SAM**: That means Tarrare had all of those needle sized ribs stabbing into the walls of a stomach at once... and he was fine! He also ripped a live cat apart with his bare hands, drank its blood, and ate everything but its bones, and then later gagged up the fur and skin like an owl... but you know, that's neither here nor there.

(The doctor of the military hospital speaks to his nurses)

**DOCTOR**: \*nonchalantly\* After reviewing our data, I've come too the scientific conclusion that, uhh, yeah... we got a goddamn demon on our hands.

**SAM**: But as we all know with, great devour comes great responsibi­lity. Since Tarrare *was* still technicall­y enlisted, the military decided to utilize his abilities for the greater good.

(The general stands in Tarrare's hospital room)

**GENERAL**: Hey Tarrare!. It's me, the General! listen could you eat this box with a note in it for me?

**TARRARE**: \*grumpy\* Mmhmmmhm...

**GENERAL**: If you do it, we'll give you a wheelbarro­w full of bull organs.

**TARRARE**: \*excited exhale (gasp?)\* \*grabs the box with an enlongated hand and devours it whole\*

**SAM**: Lo and behold, two days later, he passed thecontainer in mint condition and was given his reward as promised. With this proof-of-c­oncept, they made him an official spy and sent him into Prussia with a document in his belly to be delivered to an imprisoned French colonel. Unfortunat­ely, there are a couple things Tarrare couldn't do that are generally important when sneaking into another country. A: He couldn't speak German,

(Tarrare says "Nein Sproychen Doychen", eye-spelling for poor German meaning something like "No Speak Germans".)

**SAM**: And B: It's pretty hard to maintain a low profile when you're running around like a madman, wolfing down garbage, and mutilating small animals.

(Tarrare scours a pile of garbage, eats out of an entire can of trash, as in he holds it over his mouth, and tears a rooster in half repeatedly before a garrison of soldiers surround him with guns drawn)

**SAM**: So he ended up being captured by the enemy. Initially, he kept his mouth shut, for once, but after a whipping and a day in jail, Tarrare gave in. After confessing that he did in fact have vital intelligen­ce snaking its way through his G.I. tract, the Prussians chained him to a latrine until the box emerged 30 hours later. The note wasn't actually anything important,

(The stained note, presumably held by a Prussian soldier, reads "So wait, there's a prussia and a russia? pls clarify. Love, French")

**SAM**: so they just mock executed him, gave him a severe beating and sent him on his way.

(Tarrare is at the gallows, then punched by a soldier wearing a "95" hat and white satchel, then shown lying on the ground where they captured him previously)

**SAM**: After all that Tarrare returned to life at the hospital, desperate for a cure for his condition, but nothing they ever tried worked. Meanwhile the man's endless hunger continued to get him into all sorts of trouble. He'd often sneaked out of the hospital to eat the scraps behind the local butcher and fight stray dogs in the alley for their precious garbage.

(Tarrare and a dog are in an alley, presumably behind the local butcher, and fight over a piece of meat both are clinging their teeth onto. Tarrare, on his fours, stands in a brownish puddle of what one can only hope is dirty water or meat run-off)

**SAM**: He'd also seek out patients undergoing bloodletti­ng in order to take all their life juice for himself.

(Tarrare is lying at the foot of a patient's bed, holding the man's arm and squeezing it over his mouth like a wet towel.)

**SAM**: On several occasions he was even caught attempting to eat bodies in the mortuary.

(Tarrare has shoved half an oddly realistically-drawn cadaver into his mouth while the horrifier hospital staff watch)

**SAM**: \*Sitting at a computer, with a voice over\* By this point my research, I was so desensitiz­ed to this guy that I didn't even bat an eye when I first read that. I was just like "All right- I guess he must have been hungry".

**SAM**: Anyway, the hospital staff begrudgingly tolerated Tarrare'S buffoonery, until one day when he went too far.

(The head doctor is in Tarrare's room with a clipboard.)

**DOCTOR**: Well Tarrare, you've only had three mess-hall raids, four miscellane­ous trash related mishaps and one cadaver defiling, so I'd say so far this week's been pretty good.

(Audible knock at the door are heard. Tarrare's expression changes rapidly from his usual content to wide-eyed)

**NURSE**: Doctor, we should probably inform you that a 14 month old child has gone missing from their room.

(The doctor stands in thought for a moment while Tarrare, still visibly uncomfortable, turns away and holds his arm with the other)

**DOCTOR**: Tarrare. Look at me. ***Did you eat a fucking baby?***

(Tarrare sweats profusely)

**SAM**: Tarrare was promptly kicked out of the hospital and spent four years out and about doing, you know, whatever horrific shit you can imagine. When he came back he was suffering from advanced tuberculos­is and died shortly after arrival. During his autopsy, the surgeons found that when they looked into his mouth, they could see all the way down his throat and into his stomach cavity.

(A shot of Tarrare's esophagus. You can see a live cat at the very bottom, looking very unhappy with its predicament)

**SAM**: As you can imagine his whole abdominal region was profoundly deformed. Basically, if this is a normal human, this is what they found inside Tarrare.

(A graphic of a normal human anatomy charge, compared to one in which the stomach and intestines are extremely enlarged)

**SAM**: Just like the man's mind we can see that around 90% is devoted towards food and 10% towards everything else.

**SAM**: So moral of the story here is that- no, you know? Not even I can find anything resembling a moral here. Not all stories have a point to them. Sometimes they're just sad and disgusting, from beginning to end. And now a word from our sponsor!

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[Outro]

## Trivia

* Sam states that it is strange how Tarrare's digestive tract was undamaged by the needle-like ribs of the eel he swallowed whole. Although it is commonly said, that swallowing fish bones is dangerous, most of the time, they serve only as a choking hazard and not as a danger to the inner lining of the esophagus or the stomach, with cases of cuts or penetration of the flesh occuring very rarily. Given how Tarrare's throat and esophagus were described as being extremely malformed and widened, neither of these would have proved any more dangerous than other objects he consumed on the regular.
* The unnamed doctor at the French hospital was Pierre-François Percy, who wrote the paper on Tarrare's condition.
* The unnamed French general described was Alexandre de Beauharnais, who did not sport a neat mustache.
* After the missing baby incident, Tarrare never actually returned to the hospital in Soultz-Haut-Rhin. Instead, he found his way to a clinic in Versailles, whereupon the original doctor received report from a colleague there.