Learning Day: How to Become Good at Knife Fighting 🌭

You can’t trust WikiHow to teach you even the most basic of life skills. If you learn how to ride a bike from WikiHow you’ll wind up with a handlebar up your ass and wheels on your hands like the Wheelers from Return to Oz. Yes, they all had handlebars up their asses. Read a book.

So trusting WikiHow to teach you something with higher stakes is like playing Russian roulette with your own memory. Even if you read it as a joke there’s a chance that, in a panic situation, your brain will mistakenly pull out some WikiHow mindpoison and that’s how we wound up with the Costa Concordia. Anyway, that’s the disclaimer you get before we learn:

Every instructor of any kind of fighting style makes it a point to tell you right off the bat that you should never use their teachings for any reason. If you ask the instructors, it’s because they don’t want to wind up liable if you kill eight men in an Outback Steakhouse with Wikarate. If you ask anybody that’s actually tried using martial arts in a street fight, it’s because the best counter for a crane kick is “punch, then derisive laughter.”

Right after telling you to never use anything they teach you, martial arts instructors are also obligated to explain that the best defense is running away.

If possible, try to keep a steely-eyed expression as you flee from the Vulcan with the invisible machine gun.

Here is yet another way not to use a knife:

Yes, do take time out of every fight to explain the sexual power dynamics between you and your knife dominatrix. Make sure you tell your opponent the name of your knife and what you think is sexy about it. Lick the blade while making eye contact. If it’s got one of those little guard loop things, try fingerbanging it. Just generally make them feel real gross about this whole scenario until they leave. This is called Turkey Vulture Style, or the Shkreli-defense. Alternatively, you could just kick them in the balls like the Rolling Stones said. Really just make sure you’ve tried every other option before resorting to a martial art, because it’s a very embarrassing thing to be doing while you die.

Now that we’ve tried everything in our power not to engage in knife fighting, it’s time to learn about knife fighting.

Our first step is to look up knives on the internet to figure out what kind of Knife Person we want to be. Do you want to be a Switchblade Sally? A Kurki Kelly? When you give your life to the knife, you want to be sure. Pick too hastily and you’ll wind up a Corvo Carl, trying to stab up a steakhouse with your sad flaccid penis-blade.

Yeah, never trust a “misleading” knife. A good knife is like a second grade teacher explaining why you can’t be a Lamborghini when you grow up: Painfully direct.

All right, we’re getting into the useful stuff! You can basically grab your knife any way you want, including upside down with the blade pointing toward you, like you’re trying to hold yourself hostage. Now this is an advanced move, but remember: we want to try everything not to knife fight. Distraction, bluffing, fleeing and general deceit are the cornerstones of good knife fighting. So the best stance to adopt if you’re trying to convince an attacker that you’re a dangerous expert knife fighter is with the blade to your own throat, while screaming “back off! I’ll cut him!”

Actually, forget everything you’ve learned so far about knife fighting. Which I guess is just “never knife fight.” Because there is one scenario in which you absolutely have to knife fight, and that’s if you ever meet another knife fighter.

Apparently knife fighters operate on a kind of little-dick Highlander system, where when two knife owners meet, one must die, or at least take a karambit to the lovehandle and have mom drive them to urgent care.

Knives hate each other, this is a fact. You should always be trying to stab your opponent’s knife when you’re not stabbing yourself. You should also always be moving in one of the available directions, but never up, diagonal, or through time.

Now it’s time to apply everything we’ve learned about knife fighting which, to recap, is “don’t knife fight, if you cut yourself first maybe they won’t even want to cut you, nobody hates a knife fighter like another knife fighter, and do not stab time.” We’re ready to tackle our first practical exercise:

Yes, definitely incorporate your smallest child into your insane knife fighting drills. Hand them permanent markers because children love and should be trusted with those, then tell them to pretend it’s a knife and attack you. This will teach them that attacking you with knives is a fun, low-stakes activity that all can enjoy. Once the child starts slashing at you with a Sharpie, strip to the waist and fight them. This will serve two functions: It will teach you to fight children, and it will teach children to fight you. It will turn every family gathering into a kind of intergenerational blade Cold War that will either end with you at the absolute bottom of the prison pecking order, or with a deeply embarrassing obituary.

That’s it for the guide: You learned how to commit suicide by toddler, possibly for insurance reasons or to spite your bitch of an ex-wife who left you for an Outback Steakhouse waiter and took half of everything you held dear despite not even being that into Funko Pops.

But that’s not it for the WikiHow page! The art of “How to Become Good at Knife Fighting” is crazy even for WikiHow, which always looks like somebody traced a church pamphlet on the merits of abstinence, added in resistance bands, and titled it “How to Get Fit With Pantomime.” For some reason all the knife-fighting art features husky teens giving each other fuckeye in Zach Morris sweaters:

It’s not that I don’t applaud the realism: basically everybody reading “How to Become Good at Knife Fighting” on WikiHow is going to be a pudgy 14 year old that doesn’t know how to dress. I’m just saying it’s bold of them to acknowledge that most actual knife fights are between two brothers in a Branson suburb warring over the last Pizza Bagel.

Let’s check out the follow-up section, where WikiHow readers can pose questions that are answered by other WikiHow readers, a practice so obscene and stupid that it’s actually often beautiful. Kind of like photocopying an ass and then photocopying that photocopy until the butthole derezzes and you’re left with modern art.

Please notice the answer is not “holy fuck don’t do that” or “the authorities have already been contacted.” 53 Wikihow readers thought it was helpful to suggest that somebody who wants to bring weapons to school should look for a legal loophole before doing it. I guess hoping for the child murder version of the Air Bud clause - “there’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t bring a patu to the Spirit Week assembly!”

Asking if a bayonet could be used in knife fighting is the closest you will ever come to getting a knife enthusiast to admit that this is all pointless in a world that has guns. 20 WikiHow readers thought it was helpful to begrudgingly concede that, if you have a knife and a gun, maybe you could stab and shoot.

One silly WikiHow reader pointed out that most “knife fighting duels” are actually just surprise stabbings, and thus the entire high-stakes world of skilled blade-dueling is a lie meant to dupe budding incels into burning their birthday money at the mall ninja store. Only one person found that bit of self-reflection helpful, and it should be noted that WikiHow does count the original poster as a ‘helpful’ vote.

That is crazily worded but holy shit, is it saying it’s legal to use a knife to stop people from hurting themselves? How does that work, exactly? Are we talking like, slash the hamstrings of a jumper to keep them from jumping? Can you stab the pill out of a potential suicide’s hand? Can you-

Double holy shit there are knife cops???

I have a new career goal. Look, I don’t want anybody thinking I approve of something as primitive and dangerous as the US justice system, but I’m all in on Knife Cops. I probably have to train for decades to be called Sergeant Switchblade though, right?

I will see you in a month. And if you, too, study the blade then we will duel to the death as honor demands.

Or if you take the last Pizza Bagel.

Or if you’re a toddler.

Or if you just look sad.