You're No One If You Don't Puke On Stage

Biebs letting fly with a liquid laugh last week.

I

f you're a top-selling Top 40 artist, it's important to keep up with the latest trends. And if, like Lady Gaga you're an artist who counts on being outrageous and controversial, it doesn't help to be outshone by someone as bland and un-cutting edge as Justin Bieber. Which is why it was important that Lady Gaga follow the Biebs' on-stage puking episode with one of her own.

Only a week after a video of Justin Bieber hurling on stage went viral, Lady Gaga has emerged with a yak-vid of her own, showing her chundering multiple times before resuming her performance. Gaga even tweeted about the event after the show: "Was praying nobody saw but actually it's quite a good laugh if you need one!"

Rhianna and Katy Perry have both had upchuck incidents recently, but theirs weren't caught on video.

Even the man of La Mancha did it.

Of course, neither Bieber or Gaga is the first performer to make a technicolor yawn during a performance. Rhianna and Katy Perry have both had upchuck incidents recently, but theirs weren't caught on video.

It's not hard to imagine why this would happen, especially with performers who give highly physical performances, and it's not hard to imagine why these videos are emerging, given that all anyone seems to do at concerts nowadays is take crappy iPhone videos to post to YouTube.

Besides, Paris Hilton puked on stage in 2006 while lip-syncing to her album, proving that she is the ultimate trend-setter.

But if this whole public regurgitation thing really catches on, we'd like to see it move beyond the pop arena. Seeing Bruce Springsteen toss his cookies during one of his lengthy between-song monologues would add a welcome bit of levity to his three-hour concerts, and maybe Henry Rollins could punctuate one of his insightful rants against U2 or people who text too much with a lenghty projectile spew. Even the presidential debates could be livened up considerably if the moderator blew grits every time one of the candidates stretched the truth or evaded a question. 

Vomiting has long been a staple of the teen gross-out comedy film, and its roots in literature run deep: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza lose it several times in Cervantes' classic novel, including a scene in which Don Quixote wretches in Sancho's face, which in turn causes Sancho to belch forth back into his master's face.

And now that Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga have brought upchucking out of the water closet and to the masses, we look forward to more celebs downloading their dinners for our amusement.