Much less ideally, you can short a cap with a screwdriver or something, but the degree to which that's a bad idea scales at least linearly with the value of the cap.

I did that once with a photoflash cap, while trying to troubleshoot a failed Nikon SB-R200 ring-mount flash head - expecting the failure to be in the control circuitry, I wasn't sure whether it had died with charge on the cap. It had! Luckily I had the good sense to point the thing away from me, because it melted a chunk out of the screwdriver tip and distributed it as slag across my worktop. Even as it was, my ears took most of an hour to stop ringing.

A fair question at this point is: with a capacitor big enough to be that dangerous, why wasn't there the kind of bleeder resistor we're talking about? In this case, it's also a design feature, because flashes run on batteries and you don't want to waste charge, or have to wait all over again for the battery to charge the cap every time you switch on the unit. Too, these flash heads have no externally accessible contacts through which the cap might discharge into the user, and the charge circuit uses a MOSFET to switch battery power to the cap, so even if you go poking fingers into the battery compartment, it still won't light you up.

Nonetheless, it serves as a good example of why you want to be very careful with high-power capacitors. The one I'm talking about is only about the size of the second joint of your thumb, small enough to fit into a flash head that itself fits into an adult's palm. Even so, at full charge it had enough juice to blow up a screwdriver and injure my hearing - and if I'd been even more careless and discharged it through my actual hand, I don't doubt I'd have ended up with a permanent scar.

Be smarter than I was! Discharge your big caps through a high-value resistor before you do anything else with them.