Steve-O is a man who, for a fairly large chunk of his career, made a living by stapling his balls to his thigh.

Steve-O is fearless. He sets his hair on fire. He lets people throw darts at him. He shoots fireworks out of his bottom with such confusing regularity that people often mistake him for Sydney Harbour Bridge. But even Steve-O’s boundless physical endurance has its limits, which is why he ducked out of last night’s Dancing With The Stars because he hurt his back.

Next week: Johnny Knoxville quits Hell’s Kitchen because an onion looks at him funny.

All reality shows come replete with their fair share of dangers. American Idol contestants often have to battle laryngitis and vocal cord nodules. Anyone appearing on Survivor can expect to be pushed to the brink of physical exhaustion. And Beauty And The Geek routinely plunges people into the endlessly dark void of inescapable mental despair. Or maybe that’s just us.

The point is, Dancing With The Stars shouldn’t be one of these shows. It’s about ballroom dancing, for crying out loud – the sort of thing organised by nursing home staff to help take the residents’ minds off the fact that their families no longer love them. At best, the worst injury anyone expects from Dancing With The Stars is either the onset of deep-vein thrombosis brought about by unusually tight spandex or accidental sequin inhalation.

But no. Because this year’s Dancing With The Stars is killing people.

Just over a week ago, Nancy O’Dell and Jewel backed out of Dancing With The Stars due to injury. Not a total surprise, given that Nancy O’Dell’s hair makes her precipitously top-heavy and Jewel is, well, Jewel – but now things are getting serious. Steve-O, the Jackass star who deliberately injures himself for money, has also hurt himself enough to miss a show. AP reports:

The reality star was forced to skip Monday’s “Dancing With the Stars” after falling on his back during a dress rehearsal earlier in the day. He landed flat on his back after a failed front flip, smashing his spine into the microphone pack all performers wear. The 34-year-old was already nursing a pinched nerve in his back.

Well, look, OK, that does sound sort of painful. But Steve-O is a man who once skateboarded through a wall of fluorescent strip lightbulbs and trampolined into a ceiling fan and pushed a spike through his cheek on purpose and went to hospital for being mentally ill. Twirling around for the benefit of a shrieking Italian judge on Dancing With The Stars should be a cakewalk for him.

But it just goes to show that Dancing With The Stars is harder than it looks. And we agree with you completely, by the way – we’ve got our fingers crossed that it’ll be Denise Richards next, too.

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