Unfortunately, the horror injury that befalls Ben Stiller’s character Ted, in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary, often traverses the realm of fiction to bestow real-world agony upon boys and men who wish they’d opted for a button fly. A 2005 paper by Dr. Satish Chandra Mishra from Charak Palika Hospital in New Delhi, India looked at reported methods of intervention for this most unpleasant of problems and found that many common approaches either take too long or can actually make the circumstances worse. The researchers’ paper, “Safe and painless manipulation of penile zipper entrapment,” details instead a “quick, simple and non-traumatic” method using wire cutters and a pair of pliers – though “painless” does seem a highly ambitious adjective in this particular context.