A little less gilded, but more deserving of your awe, are the intellectual or humanitarian awards. There is the exalted Noble prize, the Booker prize for literature or journalism’s highest accolade, the Pulitzer.

And then there are those awards that are a little more, well, low-key. They also tend to be rather quirky and celebrate mankind’s more questionable ‘achievements’.

Annual Golden Raspberry Awards www.razzies.com

Otherwise known as the ‘Razzies’, the Golden Raspberry Awards are the anti-Oscars. Bestowed annually since 1980 on actors, directors and films to (dis)honour the worst achievements in film, the Razzies cover all manner of categories, from the obvious ‘Worst Picture’ to the more obscure ‘Most Tiresome Tabloid Targets’.

Last year ‘Basic Instinct 2’ won a whopping four Razzies — worst picture, worst actress, worst sequel and worst screenplay. Perhaps it’s worth giving this one skip.

The Darwin Awards darwinawards.com

Named after the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards “salute the improvement of the human genome by honouring those who accidentally remove themselves from it.” Yes, they are bestowed posthumously.

Here is the story of one of the 2006 Darwin Award winners:

A man in Brazil tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG), apparently to sell the scrap metal, by driving back and forth over it with a car. When this proved ineffective, he pounded the RPG with a sledgehammer. The explosion proved fatal to the man, six cars and the repair shop where he was pounding the RPG. Unfortunately he was unable to take advantage of the surplus of scrap metal.

Ig Nobel Prize

Yip, you guessed it, the Ig Noble Prize is a light-hearted parody of the Nobel Prize. Handed out each year in October, around the time the real Nobel laureates are announced, the Ig Nobels are given for achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think.”

Although occasionally veiled criticism, the awards, which are organised by the scientific humour magazine ‘Annals of Improbable Research’, recognise genuine achievements. The awards cover ten categories — those covered by the Nobel prize as well as public health, engineering, biology and interdisciplinary research – and are bestowed on recipients by genuine Nobel laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University.

The awards draw attention to research that has a humorous or unexpected dimension. The research of past winners includes the discovery that ostriches tend to become sexually aroused in the presence of humans, the validity of the ‘five-second rule’ and the proposition that black holes fill all the technical specifications to be the location of Hell.

The awards ceremony is traditionally closed with the words: “If you didn’t win a prize — and especially if you did — better luck next year!”

Big Brother Awards www.privacyinternational.org/bba

No, these awards have nothing to do with the television reality show. Named after George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ in the novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, the awards are dished out by Privacy International to ‘recognise’ “the government and private sector organisations…which have done the most to threaten personal privacy.”

The award categories include ‘Worst Public Servant’, ‘Most Invasive Company’, ‘Most Appalling Project’ and ‘Most Heinous Government Organisation’.

Foot in Mouth Award www.plainenglish.co.uk/footinmouth.htm

The Foot in Mouth Award is given annually by the British Plain English Campaign for a “baffling comment by a public figure”. Previous winners include Naomi Campbell (2006) and United States Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld (2003).

Naomi Campbell: “I love England, especially the food. There’s nothing I like more than a lovely bowl of pasta.”

Donald Rumsfeld: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns, there are things that we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Stella Award www.stellaawards.com

The Stella Award is given to people who file frivolous and ridiculous lawsuits. The award is named after Stella Liebeck (79), who in 1992 spilled a cup of McDonalds’ coffee onto her lap, burning herself in the process. She sued McDonalds and was awarded $2.9 million in damages, which was later reduced by a judge to $640 000.

Bad Sex in Fiction Award

This award is given out annually by the London literary journal ‘Literary Review’ to the author who produces the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. It was established in 1993 by Literary critic Rhoda Koenig and the then editor of ‘Literary Review’, Auberon Waugh to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

Authors who were discouraged from ever writing about sex again (or perhaps simply ever writing again) include Giles Coren (2005) for ‘Winkler’ and Iain Hollingshead (2006) for ‘Twenty Something’.

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest www.bulwer-lytton.com

Mmm…okay, so perhaps this falls under the category of ‘competition’ rather than ‘award’, but it was funny, so we included it anyway.

This tongue-in-cheek contest run by the English Department at the San Jose State University invites entrants to compose “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels”. That is, it should be deliberately bad.

The competition, which initially had three entrants, now has over 10 000 entrants competing for the $250 prize. The overall winner in 2006 was Jim Guigli, who wrote the following exceptionally awful first sentence:

“Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your won grave and lick the shovel clean.”