As a contributor to this site I consider myself something of a karaoke expert. I use to work in a karaoke bar and that’s actually how I’ve made my way through university. I also worked in an electronics store, and I was in charge of the stereo equipment. That means I had to become deeply familiar with a variety of karaoke equipment and supplies. I’m also a big fan when it comes to karaoke singing and I have a bunch of friends who share in my passion. As a result, I have basically seen it all when it comes to singing karaoke. You probably already know that karaoke lends itself to some embarrassing situations – you might have even seen a few of them in person yourself. Here are some of my favourite embarrassing karaoke stories that I’ve witnessed through the years.
1. This first story took place on Halloween. There was a huge celebration at the karaoke bar and hundreds of people were packed into the place. Needless to say there were a lot of people who were drunk, and I might have even had a glass of wine or two. There was one lady on stage who was particularly inebriated, and she was wearing a long way and that went with her costume. No one could really tell what she was supposed to be but our guest best was a cross between Cher and Elvira.
While she was singing someone noticed a particularly peculiar smell in the air. We couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was until we saw that Cher/ Elvira had caught on fire. Her weight was apparently highly flammable and as she was singing drunkenly on stage she had stumbled too close to a candle. The weird thing was we noticed her hair was on fire before she did, but it didn’t take long for her to start screaming. Someone dumped an entire picture of water to put out the flames and the whole place smells like a wet dog afterwards. Some people say there is nothing worse than the smell of burnt hair, but the smell of burnt hair plus burnt wig is far worse.
2. This next story involves another drunken karaoke singer – which seems to be a theme that runs through many karaoke stories. This man was so drunk that I doubt he realized he was onstage at all. Eventually he stopped singing and started to top gibberish as he rambled around next to the spotlight. He ended up falling off the stage and landed in a pile of wires. I guess that alone doesn’t make it the most embarrassing story ever, but it was very special to meet because this man happened to be my old English teacher. In fact, all the teachers from a roll high school had gathered at the karaoke bar and most of them got drunk. It was extremely interesting to see another side of my teachers that I never thought was possible.
3. One time there was a man who got up on stage to sing a very romantic love song. He stop close to the karaoke system so that he didn’t miss any of the lyrics. You could tell he really wanted to get the song right and it was clear he was singing to his girlfriend. She was in the audience and seemed pretty happy about his performance. But then he stopped and instead of getting off stage like most people do, he lingered while holding the karaoke microphone. He started taking a brief speech telling everyone how happy he was to be there with his girlfriend. Then he made a huge announcement – he proposed to his girlfriend in front of the entire crowd. The only problem was that the girlfriend was so embarrassed that she literally stormed out of the place in tears. No one really knew how to recover from that, and that man had successfully made hundreds of people uncomfortable at the same time.
4. We used to have some people who came into that are who are pretty competitive about using the karaoke machine. They wanted to have the best song of the night, and they were always conscious of what their rivals were doing. There were two guys in particular who loved to sing Neil Diamond karaoke songs. Sometimes they would time it so that they would come to the bar on different nights to avoid conflict. But since weekends were always the most fun, they usually both showed up on either Friday or Saturday. This one particular weekend they both showed up and wanted to sing the same song. The karaoke DJ suggested that they do a duet, but before he could work out the details the two men started to fight. Neither of them were terribly athletic so it was more of a hunting match then an all out brawl. But I had never seen two people more passionate about something that was so easily resolvable.
5. There was one time when a man was singing karaoke on stage and his zipper was undone. You could basically see everything that was going on and thankfully he was wearing underwear. Almost everyone in the audience saw this man’s undone fly, and pretty soon the whole crowd was laughing. The man eventually caught on to the fact that people weren’t entirely listening to as performance. He looked down and noticed the problem immediately. Rather than getting off stage to fix the situation, or simply zipping up as fly, he chose to put the microphone in that area. No one really knows why you did that, and the crowd erupted in a mix of surprise delight and pure disgust. He seemed to be pretty cool about it and continued to sing his song to the end. But there were doing was he never zipped up his fly and it was still open the whole time.
Related posts: