This is Round Two of the Chubby Bunny competition, which tells you two things immediately: there was a Round One, and somebody thought Round One went well enough to do it again.
The variation this time is grapes instead of marshmallows. Three competitors, a bowl each, a kitchen counter, and a room full of people at a Christmas party counting out loud.
How It Went
Somebody gets to seventeen. There is a fair amount of argument about whether chewing is allowed, which it obviously is not, and somebody admits on camera that they are chewing because they like eating them, which I think we can all agree is missing the point of the competition entirely.
The crowd does what a crowd always does at these things, which is provide encouragement of steadily decreasing usefulness. You are doing great. Keep it going. Dig deep. How many are you at? Nobody can answer that, because their mouth is full of grapes.
Please Do Not Actually Do This
I want to put one honest note in here, because it would be daft to post this without it.
Chubby Bunny is genuinely more dangerous than it looks, and people have choked doing it. Grapes are arguably worse than marshmallows for exactly the reason they seem safer: they are smooth, round, and almost precisely the size of an airway, which is why they are on every list of foods you are told to cut up for small children. We were a bunch of twenty year olds and we got away with it. Just know what you are playing.
The Accidental Blueprint
Here is what strikes me looking back at this one, and it is the only reason it is worth a post at all.
This is a challenge video. It has everything the format would later standardise on: named competitors in the title, a stupid escalating rule, a running count, reaction shots of the people watching, and an ending where somebody wins and nobody cares who. We were not making content. It was a party and a camera was there.
Within about four years that exact structure would be a genre with millions of views attached to it. Nobody in this kitchen had any idea. There is something clarifying about that, because the videos that ended up defining a format were almost never made by people trying to define a format. They were made by people messing about with their friends, and the messing about is the part that translated.
Filmed with the ARTISTS crowd at Texas A&M, the same group I later made a promo video for.