‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin: The Manliest Man Who Ever Lived? (VIDEO)

A legend in the (crazy) flesh.

"NEVER poke one of these angry bitches. Unless you're me.

“Never EVER touch a rattlesnake,” Steve exhorts us in the above clip. Which is, we’ll concede, sound advice. Alas, he opts to raise a gleeful middle finger at his own wise words by encroaching on the snake’s lair and POKING ITS BIG ANGRY SNAKE FACE IN THE FACE WITH A STICK. Will this suffice for the renowned Australian conservationist/zoo dude/mad, mad bastard? It won’t, as he proceeds to grab the beast and fondle it in a manner so replete with affection that his film crew were tempted to find the pair a hotel room, so Steve could engage in an illicit night of snakey snake-sex with a snake.

Australia’s acclaimed ‘Crocodile Hunter’ was allegedly presented with a 12-foot python for his sixth birthday. He proclaimed, “What the shit, ma? That bitch could swallow me whole! Where’s the mountain bike I wanted? Goddamn hippie parents.” (Except he didn’t.) As such, it’s plain that the man’s later emphatic insistence that he had spent his entire life around animals was not bullshittery. By 'animals,' furthermore, we’re referring to an array of monstrosities that would send many a lesser dude into paroxysms of horror and/or soiled undercrackers.

His fledgling frolics as a presenter included the foreboding-sounding series The Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World. From the title, we’d venture that these reptiles aren’t the sort of guys that’ll invite you to a merry barbeque in their yard; discussing their snake son’s snake lessons at snake school in an amiable manner. Nuts to that, say these malevolent bastards, they’d rather inject pain-inducing death venom into your nutsack. The never-perturbed Irwin, nonetheless, croons to them like one would their newborn child. Any sensible dude would endeavor to crush them into a blood-leaking, fang-and-reptile-fragments stain on the asphalt with their car.

Sufficiently potent poison to murderize the entire population of the world? The Crocodile Hunter has no shits to give about such trivial matters as that. Bollocks like cannonballs indeed.

Nor was it solely snakes that this guy dicked around with. He had an illustrious career of capering with an array of ludicrously dangerous death-creatures from the depths of Satan’s asshole. See him right there, apparently doing a gleeful little jazz hands dance routine about three-eighths of an inch from some tusktastic furious elephants?
“If this were anybody else,” quoth Elephant #2, “My tusk would be so far up their rectum it’d be coated in whatever he ate for breakfast a week ago. This guy’s just too awesome.”
Crocodiles, big cats, Godzilla, the entire encroaching attack force from War of the Worlds... if it’s a massive bitch from the animal kingdom, Steve Irwin bounded about in its enclosure with naught but his trademark CRIKEY!

"Unless my illustrious experience deceives me, what I have here is A BIG 'EFFING SNAKE."

Not only was this zookeeper/entertainer unafraid, he was exuberantly unafraid. Combined with his childlike fascination with even the ghastliest of nature’s abominations, his irreverent style was beloved by audiences worldwide. Who else, prithee, could conclude a harrowing how a crocodile almost ate my arm right off anecdote with a merry, “...but I don’t blame Graham. He’s just a naughty boy.”

A freak stingray incident in September 2006 wasn’t the melodramatic demise worthy of this eccentric, courageous character, but the legacy of his conservation work, and his mantastic reputation, endures.