An Alabama man who went viral over the New Year’s holidays for getting himself stuck in a decorative urn has a message for the millions who enjoyed watching him drunkenly shout obscenities as he struggled to get out of it: You’re welcome.
“I’m glad that I’ve been able to give people pleasure on their Monday,” Connor Padgett said in a new podcast on Monday.
Padgett, an architect for a Birmingham firm, was dubbed the new hero of 2024 after footage of him crammed inside a large vase—surrounded by drink-toting partygoers offering well-intentioned but useless tips for how to get out—blew up on social media. The footage, filmed by a bartender at the house party in Mountain Brook where Padgett said he’d climbed into the vase as part of a “game,” showed 39 seconds of sheer chaos.
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“Call the fire department to break this motherfucker!” Padgett shouted at one point, as fretting guests insisted he could break free if he just put his mind to it. “You can do it!” one woman cheered, while another bizarrely urged him to simply take his belt off. “I am doing everything I fucking can, goddamnit!” he replied, adding: “I already took my belt off, and that didn’t do shit” in a thick Southern drawl.
A podcaster who goes by “Kristi Yamaguccimane” called the urn debacle the “whitest shit” he’d ever seen in an interview Monday with Padgett about the whole experience on JortsCenter.
Padgett had a few things he wanted to set straight. For starters, he said, “It’s not an urn, obviously,” it’s a “vase.”
He said the ordeal began with an innocent “game” in which people would take turns hiding inside the vase.
“One person had gotten into it, I saw him get out of it beautifully. And then another person, who slightly had a bigger ass than I do, got into it. So I figured, ‘Gosh, if they can get into it and out of it, hell, I figure I can too.’ So my stupid ass got in it,” he said.
Then, when he was “ready to get out of it,” he couldn’t.
“They started telling me to take my belt off. I was like, I don’t know what the fuck that’s going to do,” he said, adding, “I don’t suggest getting in one of them fuckers.”
Eventually, the crowd realized they would have to bust him out of it, leading to a “very nice young fellow” coming to his aid to “slightly chisel” the vase and rescue him, Padgett said. But he had to take his pants off to escape.
“When I stood up, I could feel the shards of that vase in my ass crack… and I said, ‘I gotta get these off right now, I’m ripping ’em the fuck off,’” he said, noting that he rang in the new year pantsless.
“Everybody’s concerned about these damn pants,” he said. “The pants are fine. I got the stains out.”
He went on to say he’d prefer not to be associated with Alabama’s other latest claim to viral fame, a man who recently stripped naked and jumped into an aquarium at a Bass Pro Shop in front of freaked-out shoppers.
“I’m crazy enough but I don’t need that type of crazy,” he said.
