Throughout time, there have been plenty of very odd records that have made it onto these hallowed pages. Read on and learn about things like the stretchiest skin, largest rubber band ball, longest plank held, and so much more.
Watch It Bounce
There's a pretty good chance that you have a rubber band ball in your home somewhere – it's a great way to keep all those bands in one place, keep them from being a tangled mess, and maybe even give the kids something to do. You might even have a pretty big one rolling around, but it's nothing compared to that of Joel Waul.
Begun in April 2004, the massive beast was weighed on November 13th, 2008, at a little over nine thousand pounds. It's six feet, seven inches high, and uses over seven hundred thousand rubber bands of varying sizes.
One for Every Country
If you have a world record, you're usually pretty keen to keep it to yourself and not let anybody else beat it. This was the thinking of Wendy Suen from China, who held the record for the largest collection of snow globes in the entire world. They number more than four thousand.
The first question that comes to mind is – where does she keep all of them? The second question is – does she keep getting more? Of course she does. Not only has her collection continued to grow, but she's beaten her own Guinness record twice.
Play Freebird!
Getting a bunch of people to show up at one time is tough these days. Just try scheduling a Dungeons and Dragons session with five other people, you'll start to figure out the problem. Imagine getting two thousand, three hundred and ninety-eight people to all show up at once. That's what Du Tianlu did in Xi'an, China in May of 2017, and it was for a specific purpose: drumming!
Specifically, it was to drum on plastic cups. Anything involving that many people is no small feat. Maybe there was money involved. Or cookies. Offer people enough cookies and they might be willing to do anything.
No Square Inch Unmarked
Tattoos are becoming more acceptable, and it's pretty common to see tattooed people out and about. Gregory Paul McLaren, also known as Lucky Diamond Rich, decided a little bit of ink just wasn't going to cut it. He wasn't going to stop at a full sleeve or an intricate back design, either.
No, McLaren, from New Zealand, has spent more than a thousand hours in the parlor, getting nearly every single fragment of skin inked with designs, sayings, and sometimes just blue ink.
Start Counting
Pi is an extremely important part of mathematics. Thing is, it is an irrational number – it doesn't end. The decimals just keep getting smaller and smaller. Its fame has made it so it's a popular number to memorize.
You've probably got a few decimals under your belt just thanks to geometry class, but Rajveer Meena can beat you – unless you can do better than seventy thousand decimal places. It took him ten hours to relay all those numbers, but imagine how long it took for him to memorize them all.
The Strongest Fingers Around
Home workouts are all the rage these days. Pick up a couple of ten-pound weights from the store, load up a workout on YouTube, and you can start honing yourself. But none of that even comes close to how much Tazio Gavioli did to strengthen himself. Hailing from Italy, Gavioli holds the world record for most consecutive pull-ups at thirty-six reps.
Oh, sorry, we missed a word: the most consecutive PINKY pull-ups. His pinkies, and only his pinkies, were hooked around the bar for thirty-six reps, testing not only his arms and back, but his fingers, hands, and wrists.
Get Out the Pizza Cutters
Pizza is one of the most popular foods in the entire world, and for good reason. Bread, sauce, cheese, and your choice of toppings from pepperoni to pickles? There's something for everybody. Italians Dovilio Nardi, Andrea Mannocchi, Marco Nardi, Matteo Nardi, and Matteo Giannotte got together with a bunch of other people to create the biggest pie the world has ever seen.
The size? Hitting about twelve hundred square meters, or thirteen and a half square feet. It was named Ottavia, Italian for “eighth son.” Due to the size, they were forced to cut it square-fashion, thus ruining it.
Every Nation Loves a Sauna
A sauna is a wonderful thing. It relaxes muscles, helps you sleep, and there's even some science that shows it helps mitigate the effects of depression. All good things. A company by the name of Maximare, in Hamm, Germany, decided that they would go above and beyond, and put as many people, from as many different countries as possible inside a single sauna.
The old record was seventy-six people, which is an incredible number of people to get inside a single sauna – they just don't have that kind of space. Maximare was able to collect fifteen extra people for a total of ninety-one.
A Fashion Show for Dogs
While liking dogs is pretty close to universal, the vote on dogs in costumes is a lot more split. Snapping a pic of your pooch in an outfit might be funny, but it's a lot of work, they probably won't be comfortable, and the outfit isn't going to last long. All that being said, a group put together a festival to have the most dogs in costumed attire, which is somehow a Guinness record.
Four hundred and twenty-six dogs got into their getups and gathered at Dogtoberfest in Dunedin, Florida in 2010 to set the bar high for any other costumed pups.
Pucker Up
Public displays of affection are an interesting topic, but some people are fine with it. Guinness also seems to be fine with it, since they have a record for the longest kiss ever. It's held by Thai couple Ekkachai and Laksana Tiranarat – they locked lips for a truly eye-popping amount of time.
Maybe you're fond of your husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend, but could you handle kissing for fifty-eight hours, thirty-five minutes, and fifty-eight seconds? No sleeping, no eating, and no using the bathroom? We don't think we could handle it. That's a lot of kissing, and we have busy lives.
Biggest Burger Bandwagon
Ah, burgers. Nature's perfect food. Or at least, that's what Donald Gorske of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin thinks. He holds the record for the most McDonald's Big Macs eaten in his life. He's somehow kept track, and the number is above thirty-two thousand and still rising.
He averages about fourteen a week, but that's not even half of it. When he started, he was eating, according to him, nine a day. A day! Also according to him, he's at a trim 185 pounds (standing 6' 2”, he's at a healthy BMI) and has a cholesterol level of 140.
If You're the Only One...
Yes, there is a record for the fastest marathon run dressed as a telephone box. It's been verified and everything. The person responsible for this record is Mark Williamson, who did it on September twenty-fourth, 2017 in Hull, United Kingdom. We'd like to reiterate that he got a Guinness record for running a marathon dressed as a telephone box.
Was there already a record in place? Did someone else already run a marathon dressed as a telephone box? Williamson's time was 4 hours, six minutes, and thirty-seven seconds, which isn't too bad, considering he – once again – was dressed as a telephone box.
A Record About Recording Records
With the popularity of Guinness books, it should come as no surprise that there is a record for the owner of the most Guinness books. Why NOT include a record that is basically just self-promotion? Anyway, this record belongs to Martyn Tovey of Radstock, in the United Kingdom. He owns an impressive two thousand one hundred and sixty-four pieces of unique “Guinness Book of World Records” memorabilia.
This includes posters, pictures, playing cards, coasters, board games, shirts, and, naturally, plenty of books. It might not be the largest collection of anything, but of course, Guinness loves it.
Pass Him the Rock
Humans are all shapes and sizes, and some of those sizes are incredibly tall. Of course, there is a Guinness record for the tallest human ever, but there is also one for the tallest current human – it's currently held by Sultan Kösen of Iceland, who stretches a ridiculous eight feet, 2.82 inches tall.
He's the seventh-tallest man in history, and among only ten that are above eight feet. You won't see him on the basketball court, though – his growth is due to the condition acromegaly, from a tumor affecting his pituitary gland.
You're Always on Camera
If you're in the city of New York, there's a pretty good chance that someone is taking a picture of you. Whether that means you're in the background of someone's selfie or you're part of the pedestrians on the ground as someone is standing on the top of a building, Instagram is a New Yorker's favorite app. It's so popular to snap pics of this place that Guinness actually awarded it the Most Instagrammed City record.
With its many photogenic buildings, wide bays, and famous events, there's no surprise that there are millions of pictures of this leading city getting added to the app weekly.
Perfect for a Hot Summer Day
Ice cream is the treat to beat for days full of heat. Stacking a few scoops onto a cone and sitting on the porch is an A-plus evening, but how many scoops do you top out at?
If you're Italian Dimitri Panciera, then you can fit a hundred and twenty-five scoops of ice cream on a single normal cone. This happened in 2018, but who held the record before him? Well, he did. He beat his own record, and we hope to see him break two hundred at some point. We wonder if he teaches classes.
Belching that Busts the Books
You probably have somebody in your life that loves a nice, loud belch. Maybe it's you! For some reason, some people have the ability to project that sound of gas escaping to the back corners of the room, but nobody can beat Paul Hunn. After what must have been a training montage for the ages, Paul Hunn was able to unleash an astounding burp while being recorded by officials from Guinness.
In 2009, Hunn released a burp that measured 109.9 decibels. How loud is that? Well, a hundred and ten decibels is where things like a jackhammer, power saw, or a symphony orchestra usually sit.
He's Been Growing It Since the Eighties
A high-top fade is a swanky hairstyle that has, perhaps for good reason, gone out of style. Not to Benny Harlem, who hails from Los Angeles, California. He started getting attention for his far-out hairstyle thanks to posting about it on social media in 2016, and by 2018, Guinness came calling with a tape measure.
The fade is more than a meter tall, and it apparently takes upwards of two hours for it to reach its full potential. How does he ride in a car? Does he ever wear helmets? Does he have a really, really long bed?
Swimming Not Recommended
Good news: there's a Guinness record for the deadliest lake. Even worse, the record was awarded for something that happened in a single night. Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, released a large amount of natural carbon dioxide gas, which resulted in an astounding loss of life.
What happened was called a “limnic eruption” underneath the lake, and the amount of carbon dioxide gas is said to be as low as a hundred thousand tons, up to 1.6 million tons. Tons of gas. That's a lot of gas. The lake now sports a degassing system, which should drastically reduce any future events.
Everybody!
What party is complete without a traditional samba dance? The Brazilian samba school Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel knows that nothing is complete without a little bit of samba, and that includes “The Guinness Book of World Records.”
This school now holds the record for the largest samba dance, with an official count of eight hundred people. Quite the dance. The students and instructors at the school all danced for more than five minutes on Guinness World Records Day 2010, so if you're looking to beat this record, you're going to have to call up more than a few friends.
Showing off the Soup Strainer
One of the funny things about facial hair is it's circular. Not the hair itself – we mean the popularity. Mustaches were all the rage in the eighties and nineties, but for the last twenty years, they were pretty much out of vogue.
However, they are making a big comeback, and no one is championing them as much as Ram Singh Chauhan from Jaipur, India. He decided not to shave for thirty-seven years, resulting in a mustache that grew to be fourteen feet long. This astounding length was achieved back in 2010, and the record is still going strong to this day.
Are There Different Categories for Males?
Do you know how to spin a hula hoop? Good. What about a hula hoop that's seventeen feet and a quarter of an inch in diameter? It takes way more strength, way more concentration, and even some protective gear to pull that off, but Getti Kehayova did it, earning herself a record for “Largest Hula Hoop Spun by a Female.”
Maybe there's a guy out there with a slightly bigger one, we don't know. Kehayova had to use a protective vest to spin the hoop, and she still almost broke a few ribs doing it. She spun the hoop three times, earning herself a record.
Don't Move
Having a bee on you is never a favorite thing. You could get stung! Of course, if you're just chilling, the bee is probably just chilling, too. One man, Gao Bingguo, has the record for the most bees on him at a single time. In 2015, he had an absolutely astounding 1.1 million bees crawling over him at a single time.
The bees added two-hundred and forty pounds, he was stung over two thousand times, and his body temperature rose to about a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit.
Not That Kind of Thrown
As we talk about throwing a pot, don't picture a piece of pottery getting smashed to pieces on the floor or wall. There's probably a Guinness record for that, too, but that's not what we're here for. To throw a pot also means to shape it on a pottery wheel, and a man by the name of Joel Cherrico made a hundred and fifty-nine in a single hour, netting him the record in 2016.
It all went down in Collegeville, Minnesota by Cherrico, who did it in a pub in front of a small crowd.
We Can't Even Do It With Our Hands
Shooting an arrow might not be something you need to survive anymore, but it's still a cool skill to have. Impress your friends and put food on the table at the same time. Want to make it even more impressive? Do what Brittany Walsh can do, and shoot an arrow with your feet while pulling a handstand. Walsh holds the record for the farthest arrow shot using feet.
She's managed more than forty feet, gripping the bow and drawing the arrow with nothing but her toes. She, of course, also does it while balancing on her hands. And, like, upside-down. Neat.
One Thirsty Bird
Polly is sick of crackers – Polly needs something to drink. One Polly set a world record by doing just that, opening thirty-five canned drinks in a single minute. That's faster than two seconds per drink, which is about how fast we open them, though we usually aren't going for a record. The bird, a Macaw named Zac from San Jose, didn't have opposable thumbs to work with, he was using his feet.
That's a lot more than we could open with our feet in a single minute. After all that work, Polly has earned a tall, cool one.
Trick Shot
There's nothing like relaxing at the ping-pong table after a night of doing homework, a morning of coding, or whatever else it is people do with their lives. Those paddles are pretty small though, aren't they? The company Rise Brands, from Columbus Ohio, thought so, too, so they decided to make a big one. Their big paddle measures eleven feet, seven-point-eight inches high, and six feet, seven-point-eight inches wide.
Ping-pong tables are only five feet wide, which means this paddle allows quite the advantage. Your monthly office ping-pong tourney probably isn't going to allow it, but it's still a world record.
Been to a Lot of Weddings?
There are some skills that don't really come up in everyday life. There are also some that don't really come up at all. Ever. Such is the case of Ivo Grosche, who has the skill of removing garter belts with his teeth. Grosche, who lives in Germany, was pretty darn good at it, removing twenty-six garters in a single minute in December of 2008. What kind of legs were there?
Was this a live demonstration, or was it mannequins? We don't know. Removing even one garter belt in a minute takes some skill, but this guy was going for the record, and he got it.
Record-Breaking Anger Management
Anger is a destructive force but some people are able to channel that kind of fury into something good – or, at least, something that will be memorable in a good way. In July 2014, Lisa Dennis of Milan, Italy decided to take all her anger and let it out on a big pile of roof tiles. She holds the record for most roof tiles broken in one minute (female), with a frankly frightening nine hundred and twenty-three.
The tiles were arranged in stacks of ten, and Dennis went absolutely hog-wild on them.
Does Anybody Need a Drink?
Muhammad Rashid was in need of something to quench his thirst. In fact, he needed seventy-seven somethings to quench his thirst, and his elbow was going to help him. In 2016, Rashid broke the Guinness record for most drink cans crushed with the elbow in one minute, and he did it in Italy. For some reason, it sounds like a setup for a Bond flick, but it really happened.
For sixty seconds, Rashid brandished his elbow and had a mind to make it into the record books, spraying what was probably soda all over the place in the process.
Is That All?
This next world record all comes from one thing – the love of a son for his mother. Hoping to give his mom a birthday to remember, Raffaele Ronca commissioned the world's most expensive cheesecake. The cheesecake was made in 2017 for nearly five thousand dollars in New York City.
It has layers of cognac, and it's topped with real, actual gold flakes. Those who have a chance to try it might say that it's worth the money, but we think we'll keep saving up for something a little more worthwhile.
The Incredible Rubber Man
Want to be famous like Garry Turner? Well, all you'll need is a rare medical condition known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It affects the soft tissues in the body.
The effects of the syndrome include hypermobile joints and incredibly loose skin, which is what Garry Turner has. He holds the record for stretchiest skin since 1999. He can stretch the skin covering his stomach to more than six inches, and he feels no pain whatsoever. Born in Briton, Garry Turner is a sideshow performer and was part of something called “The Circus of Horrors” in 2005.
Dagwood Would Be Proud
As kids, you might have tried to make the biggest sandwich ever, but you probably never made a sandwich that was bigger than your head. TH Outdoor & Events LLC, however, has decided that they would, in fact, do that. They made a sandwich in 2016 that had sixty layers in it (approximately twenty inches tall), using salami, bread, and mustard.
There's no indication of what is or isn't a layer. The previous sandwich that broke the record used peanut butter, bacon, and marshmallow, which might have also gotten the award for the hardest sandwich to eat in the history of ever.
Everybody Used the Bathroom?
We're all familiar with packing into the car for a long road trip. If you're in a normal sedan you could fit four, maybe five people. In a bigger car like an SUV or a van, you could get past half a dozen. What about forty-one people? Squeezing as many people as possible into a single car is a common college game, but this is going overboard.
Still, a total of forty-one people squeezed themselves into a Toyota Rav 4 at the Toyota Centre Krasnoyarsk Zapad in Russia, which helped them earn this Guinness record.
Ab Goals
You can start working on this next world record right now: Just settle onto your toes and forearms in a position called a plank. It's a common exercise to work multiple areas of the body, but unless you're trained, you'll start feeling the burn after just a few seconds.
A few seconds wasn't long enough for Mao Weidong of China, who decided to set a record that will make us all start sweating. In 2016, the forty-five-year-old Chinese policeman set the record at eight hours and one minute!
Hey, a Record I Could Beat
Eating a hamburger is usually a slow, lingering affair. You want to take in every single bit of wonderful beefy flavor before you're left with a sad, empty plate. That wasn't the case for Takeru Kobayashi when he got the world record for most hamburgers eaten in three minutes in 2014 in Milan, Italy.
He pounded twelve patties, complete with buns and, oddly, mayonnaise. It's a dark horse pick, but we support it. Also, twelve hamburgers in three minutes don't leave a lot of time to taste all that good stuff, so maybe we're not so interested in it.
We Hope You Have Extra Oxygen Tanks
Making a human pyramid isn't the hardest thing in the world, but getting all those people balanced definitely takes some doing. What about doing it underwater? Is that...harder? We guess it's probably harder. Still, the people will be able to swim to get up to the top. Organized by three people, this event took place in the ocean off Thailand, and it utilized sixty-two people.
It was the largest underwater human pyramid, and we bet it was pretty close to the largest human pyramid of all time. Actually, maybe it's easier to do it underwater.
We Need a Movie About Him Immediately
Some Guinness records are expected, like the tallest human. Some are specific, like most cans crushed with an elbow. Some are hilariously specific, like “Longest Human Tunnel Travelled Through by a Skateboarding Dog.” The owner of this record is a rad English Bulldog named Otto, who hopped on his board and rode through the legs of thirty people in Lima, Peru.
Since Otto was able to guide the skateboard without being guided or touched in any way, he and his owners are the proud recipients of one of the best Guinness records possible. Otto skateboarded into our hearts in 2015, and he hasn't left since.
Like a Porcupine on Your Face
A beard is handy for a lot of things. Like, as Joel Strasser discovered in 2018, storing toothpicks. How did Mr. Strasser discover this? Well, he put a lot of toothpicks into his beard. This is the kind of world record that Guinness has started being really picky about – it has to be something that is actually notable, and it has to be verified.
Still, Strasser succeeded in getting into the big book of records, fitting thirty-five hundred toothpicks into his beard over the course of three hours and thirteen minutes. Did it take the same amount of time to remove them all?
That's a Lot of Dairy
The noble profession of ice cream man is still around! Long ago, the ice cream man was the king of the neighborhood, and hearing him approaching was enough to get every kid for blocks around running. Allan Ganz holds the record for the longest career as an ice cream man.
At his spot in West Peabody, Massachusetts, Allan Ganz has been passing frozen treats through the window of an ice cream truck for more than seventy years. He only does this for a portion of the year, of course, but he still only takes one day off per season.
Get Out the Needles
Many of us have piercings somewhere on our bodies, even if for most of us that just means a few holes in the ears. Just a few holes in the ears weren't enough for Elaine Davidson.
The Brazilian woman has logged a world record for most piercings, she has 462 over her entire body, including a 92 on her face alone. Did she really want to be in a Guinness book? Did she just really like getting piercings? Was it a third option altogether? We're not sure, but we'll ask her at the next meeting.
Jeepers Creepers, Where'd You Get Those Chompers
Did you know there's a record for most teeth in a mouth? You do now. It's held by Vijay Kumar V.A., from India. While most people have a max of thirty-two teeth in their mouth (when they're adults, anyway), Kumar features five extra for some genetic reason. Not only does this give him an A-plus smile, but it also netted him a Guinness World Record.
He also has quite a bit of chomping power. Will anybody ever beat this record? While it might not happen soon, anything is possible.
Italian Speed Eating
Maybe it's pizza, maybe it's cottage cheese, or maybe it's a bowl of hearty pasta, but we all have something that we can wolf down in a snap. Competitive eaters have the chance to rake in half a million dollars in winnings and sponsorships if they're good enough, so if you're a quick eater, consider going pro.
Competitive eater Michelle Lesco decided to take her quick-eating talent into a world record when she recorded the fastest time for eating a bowl of pasta. The bowl was a hundred grams, plus an undefined amount of sauce. Lesco got it all down in less than twenty-seven seconds.
Time to Make the Biggest Soup
If you're familiar with the “Guinness Book of World Records,” you're probably familiar with the food category. The most common record is to have the biggest something – pizza, doughnuts, Doritos. If there's a record for it, someone will get to work.
That someone was none other than Tony Glover of North Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. In 2014, he set the world record for the world's heaviest onion ever recorded, weighing in at a whopping eighteen pounds, 11.84 ounces. The best part is, that he was then able to turn it into the largest bloomin' onion in the world.
It Requires Lots of Beans
Few things are as classically funny as a whoopee cushion. Once upon a time, you could hide one on a chair and wait for the hilarious flatulence to ring out at the dinner table. Nowadays it's not much as far as practical jokes go, but that doesn't mean Guinness wasn't interested in a really, really big one.
The town of Covington, Kentucky, decided this was what they were going to be known for, and they pulled it off in a big way. The cushion in question measured twenty-five feet in diameter, and it took far more than one pair of cheeks to trigger it.
She Wanted to Scratch Her Own Back
Body records are some of the most famous and long-running in Guinness books since people have had bodies for – well, a long time! Having long nails is a personal choice – some like it, and some don't. Lee Redmond chose to start growing her fingernails out in 1979. Adding up all ten of the fingernails, they come to twenty-eight feet and four inches long, which netted her the world record by quite a margin.
Sadly, Redmond lost her nails in a car accident. That seems like it could be a joke, but it's real.
Down the Hatch!
One peculiar category in these Guinness books is the swallowing category. Some people have the training and control to “swallow” something like a sword (without chewing, obviously) and then bring it right back up without suffering any damage. Definitely, definitely do not do this sort of thing at home – these are professionals.
Still, once you get good enough, you could do what performer Thomas Blackthorne did, sword-swallowing a freaking jackhammer that weighed eighty-three pounds and twelve ounces. He held the weight inside his body for a little over three seconds, and excuse us, we're just getting a little dizzy.
What Do You Mean “Voluntarily”?
As a kid, you probably went to the pool and tried to hold your breath for as long as possible. Maybe you got to a minute, or a little past it, but most people have a problem with passing eighty-seven seconds. It's called a breakpoint, and it's when your brain decides breathing becomes a priority.
Some people can train themselves past it, like Spaniard Aleix Segura Vendrell. He's a professional freediver, and he can spend a lot longer under the water – almost half an hour! He was recorded as holding his breath voluntarily for twenty-four minutes and 3.45 seconds.
We Hope It's a Long Relationship
Coming in at a total of 181.41 centimeters (which is not even a total of six feet in Empirical measurements) Paulo Gabriel da Silva Barros and Katyucia Lie Hoshino are two halves of the shortest couple ever.
They were married in Brazil in November 2016. Hoshino is 35.88 inches, and Barros is 35.54 inches. Short weddings are popular these days, but this usually isn't what people think when they see it on the RSVP card.
Furious Follicles
One section of the “Guinness Book of World Records” is all about weightlifting. The biggest loads carried by men, women, and children all find a space among its hallowed pages, but what about the strongest beard? Well, the world's strongest beard is apparently owned by one Antanas Kontrimas of Lithuania.
He holds the record for the heaviest weight (140 pounds) lifted by a human beard. He achieved the record in 2013, and he can also support the weight of a human via his beard.