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So apparently wealthy Russians are paying up to $5,000 a pop to go on pirate hunting vacations. On board yachts manned by heavily armed mercenaries, they cruise around the coast of Africa trying to lure Somalian pirates into attacking them. Should any pirates be foolhardy enough to do so, the Russians then fire a flurry of bullets and explosives at them, who often react to this surprising development by dying. If this sounds to you like wealthy assholes murdering people under the thinnest possible pretense of "self defense," congratulations on not being a monster. Your parents clearly didn't fuck up that bad.

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Killing people for sport used to be one of our cultures most hallowed touchpoints. From short stories to novels to about 30 different episodes of Star Trek, the premise has been used in dozens of different forms. Which is great, when it's fiction. Normal healthy people like comedy writers have long learned to enjoy fiction as a release when we have those "I wonder what killing some dudes with a crossbow feels like" moments. So why haven't the Russians? It occurred to me that Russians haven't had nearly the same exposure to Western pop culture that I have, me having been born in a video store and raised by a tape of recordedKnight Rider episodes. So I decided that to help Cracked's wealthy Russian readership, I'd enumerate the best fictional examples of people being hunted for sport that civilization ever produced on the VHS format. Non-wealthy-Russian readers will derive no pleasure from this at all. __