They say beauty's in the eye of the beholder, and Hank the Angry Dwarf may just have proved it. In 1998, People Magazine ran its annual "Most Beautiful" issue. Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps unsurprisingly, took home the award that year.
As the New York Times described it in a quote that will make you feel old, "Less immediately explicable is the ascendancy of Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf, in the magazine's online reader poll on the same subject, conducted via its World Wide Web site at www.pathfinder.com." Wow. The angry alcoholic, known for his profanity, garnered over 200,000 votes. Susan Toepfer, People's executive editor, said at the time, 'Frankly, I think it's stupid." Yep, pretty sure that was exactly the point.
At one point People's servers were so flooded with votes, the whole system crashed. Magazine staffers even claimed they were being hacked because they had never seen something like it before. Hank would go on to be the official Most Beautiful Man Alive the following year. Just kidding, he never made the list again.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunB9knFpcWtfqbWmedSnq6iklGLBs8HToWSonl2dvLit0Z1krKyVp7u0edaamqRloJawrHs%3D