When a Night Out Goes Spectacularly Wrong: A King Street Tale
There’s been a video doing the rounds this week that perfectly encapsulates everything that’s simultaneously funny and deeply concerning about Australia’s drinking culture. Two blokes get kicked out of a strip club on King Street, and one of them—in a moment of alcohol-fueled genius—decides the best course of action is to walk into a nearby restaurant, wrestle a chair from the dining area, and hurl it at the security guard. Except he misses. Spectacularly. And knocks his own mate unconscious instead.
The footage is genuinely hilarious in that dark, can’t-look-away kind of way. The security guards are laughing, bystanders are trying not to crack up, and the bloke who threw the chair stands there with his hands on his head in what I can only describe as the universal gesture for “oh shit, what have I done?” It’s got that perfect comedic timing that you couldn’t script if you tried.
But here’s the thing that’s been nagging at me since I first saw it: this could have ended very differently. Someone in the comments mentioned lucid intervals after brain trauma—that terrifying phenomenon where someone seems fine after a head injury, but hours later they’re in serious trouble. We’ve all heard those stories. A mate gets king-hit, walks it off, goes home to sleep, and never wakes up. It’s sobering stuff, literally and figuratively.
The full video shows the chair-thrower actually had to go inside a restaurant to get his projectile, struggling with the automatic doors like they were some kind of advanced alien technology. The commitment to bad decisions is almost impressive. Almost. Because at the end of the day, this bloke was so drunk and so determined to hurt someone that he was willing to commit assault with a deadly weapon. The fact that he failed and hit his friend instead doesn’t make it any less serious.
I’ve walked past King Street more times than I can count. It’s one of those areas that Melbourne simultaneously wants to be proud of and pretend doesn’t exist. The strip clubs, the bars, the late-night chaos—it’s all part of the city’s nightlife ecosystem. But incidents like this make me wonder what we’re actually celebrating when we laugh at these videos. Sure, there’s schadenfreude in watching drunk idiots face immediate consequences for their actions. But there’s also someone who could have been seriously injured or killed.
The security guards handled it well enough, all things considered. They’re laughing because, honestly, what else can you do when someone’s aggression literally backfires on them? But I kept thinking about the poor restaurant staff who had their chair stolen, the other patrons trying to enjoy their meal, and the paramedics who probably had to deal with this mess later.
What frustrates me most is that these aren’t kids. The guys in the video look to be in their 30s or 40s—old enough to know better. This isn’t teenage experimentation with alcohol; it’s grown men who apparently never learned how to handle their booze or their emotions. The comments suggesting they’re “silver spoon cunts” from the sales team having their first night out in years might not be far off the mark.
We have this weird relationship with alcohol in Australia. We know we drink too much. We know the violence and health impacts. We’ve had countless campaigns about responsible drinking, lockout laws, coward punch legislation—all of it. Yet somehow, we still end up with situations like this making national news and becoming viral entertainment.
Look, I’m not going to pretend I’ve never had too many drinks. I’m not calling for prohibition or anything ridiculous like that. But there’s a difference between getting a bit loose and losing the ability to distinguish between a security guard and your mate when you’re hurling furniture. That’s not just “having a few too many”—that’s a fundamental inability to function as a responsible adult.
The real kicker? Now these blokes are internet famous. Their moment of spectacular stupidity is preserved forever, shared around the world. Someone mentioned their wives finding out they were at a strip club via the evening news, which is darkly amusing but also kind of sad. Imagine having to explain to your family that you’re viral because you accidentally knocked out your mate with a chair you stole from a restaurant while trying to assault a bouncer.
I genuinely hope the guy who got hit is okay. Head injuries are no joke, and the way his leg moved in the video suggested he was properly concussed at minimum. I hope his mate learned something from this, though I’m not holding my breath. And I hope the security staff got to go home that night without any actual violence directed their way—they’re just doing their jobs, after all.
Maybe we need to have a more honest conversation about drinking culture in this country. Not the hand-wringing moral panic kind, but a real discussion about why grown adults think this behaviour is acceptable. Because every time something like this happens, we all have a laugh, someone says “typical Australia,” and nothing changes. Then we rinse and repeat a few weeks later with a different video, different venue, same story.
The chair, by the way, was apparently fine. Which is more than can be said for everyone else involved.