If you are good at making different funny looks, then you would find this tradition interesting. This hilarious expression below is what gurning looks like and it is a rural English tradition celebrated since 1267.
There even existed a World Gurning Championship in England in which participants make the most grotesque face possible. If you think this is a silly tradition, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Four-time world gurning champion Peter Jackman got his teeth removed to make his expressions easier. Talk about dedication! It all started at a crab-apple fair in rural England way back in 1269.
King Henry III himself had given the fair a royal charter, so I suppose a lot of people felt compelled to eat the crab-apples, which, being ridiculously bitter, made the eaters pull funny faces, and for a bit of fun, they decided to make a contest out of it.
Almost 800 years later, the crab-apple fair is still an annual event, as is the gurning contest, although nowadays it draws contestants from all over the world. (The etymology of “gurn” is a bit muddy, though the venerable OED guesses that its provenance might be Scottish, and related to the word “grin.”
In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the word has a very different meaning “to cry.”) Over the years, serious gurners have developed a number of winning strategies, the most effective of which is to have no teeth, which makes one’s facial features much easier to warp.
England’s best-known gurner, Peter Jackman, had his teeth removed in 2000 to facilitate extreme gurning (even though he had already won the world championship four times — so dogged was he in the pursuit of gurn-fection).
Three years later, he died in a golfing accident. Which is nothing to gurn about? Gurning competitions are thought to have originated in 1297 at the Egremont Crab Fair, in the UK, named after the crab apple, which is pretty sour. It makes sense then that as part of ‘Crab Fair’ in this part of the world they hold face-pulling competitions to see who can make the ugliest face.
This must be easier for some people, though they make it even easier to make a funny face by requiring you to also wear a horse collar at the same time.
Gurning through a horse collar is known as “gurnin’ through a braffin’. A typical gurn involves projecting the lower jaw as far forward and up as possible and covering the upper lip with the lower lip. The competition is held in mid-September each year.
There are competitions for men, ladies, and juniors. Elsewhere in the world, there is a similar Mr. Ugly Competition in Zimbabwe, which requires a little more than pulling an ugly face, they are after men who are ‘naturally’ ugly!
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