So my gramma’s staying at my place for a while and that means I can’t watch what I usually do on tv. Lucky for me she loves America’s Funniest Home Videos. While watching this, I’m reminded of something I’ve always noticed throughout the years of watching.
The three videos at the end deemed to be the funniest are NEVER funny. I mean seriously, there’s no way they were funnier than the vast majority of other videos. Like just now, the winning video was some 10 year old girl dancing and her brothers (both about 6-7, so not cute babies) were behind her dancing naked. It wasn’t funny at all. It was kind of disturbing actually that the mom sent it in but that’s beside the point.
It just annoys the hell out of me and I get so angry at the judges. Which is really quite sad but nevermind that! Do I just have no sense of humor at all or do all the other normal people find these choices ridiculous?
I have theory that the AFHV producers eliminate a lot of potential finalists due to the slight chance that they might have been staged events, and fraud gets more serious when real money is involved. Hence, the clips that make it to the finals usually involve either animals or young children.
The current host mentioned one time that people always ask him why they pick 3 that aren’t funny. I forget exactly what he said but it was something like, “We know, but it’s just the way it’s always been.”
I won’t say they’re NEVER funny, but yeah, they’re often not funny, and quite often not the funniest of the night.
I think they just pick three that have people willing to travel to the studio for the taping, and a lot of the funnier ones wouldn’t/couldn’t come.
Also keep in mind that a lot of the videos are actually reused from older eps, and not actually eligible for the prize anymore.
The real problem I have is with the way the audience votes on the three finalists. They’ll usually vote for a non-funny video with a kid in it instead of a freakin hilarious video without a kid in it. Damn kids… git [del]off mah lawn[/del] outta mah finalists…
I think the funniest videos they show are the candid accident types; fat lady falls off of log into ditch, kid on sled knocks down 5 other kids, dancer falls off stage, porch swing collapses, guy scares the crap out of his roomate and he falls down stairs, brides hair catches fire, etc. But they never pick these as the finalists. Probably because they don’t want to encourage anyone to make “fake” accidents.
So they pick the safe ones; baby giggles at burp, guy balances a plate on his nose, etc.
Well in a ‘hilarious’ change of events, the second episode that aired after I posted this actually have two quite funny finalists. Of course the baby one won. All I can say is that no matter how annoying this show gets, it’s leaps and bounds above America’s Funniest Pets and that new one with Arsenio Hall. Poor, desperate Arsenio…
I can’t remember when it is was, maybe a few weeks ago, maybe a few months. But AFHV came on after whatever show I was watching ended and I wanted to see what kind of clips made it in the show now.
I agree. Were the boys just getting out of the bathtub or what? It bugs me when the winner is a kid behaving badly and that happens a lot.
Something else I’ve noticed is that some people must have their cameras on all the time. Why else would we see someone in a bucket loader dumping sand into a truck? Or just walking across a room and tripping on something? Or getting in or out of a boat? They’re obviously staged, but the show doesn’t seem to care.
What bothers me is when somebody is in trouble and obviously could be helped out by the person with the camera, but the person with the camera won’t put it down to help out the poor soul falling off the stepladder/having boxes falling on his head/with her dress tucked in the back of her pantyhose.
It’s funny when some asshole tries to do something stupid and pays the consequences, but not always funny when an innocent person minding his own business is assaulted and the bozo with the camera is taking advantage.
And yes, J-P-L, if your kid is barfing, put down the fucking camera and help your kid.
Some of the kid videos make me wonder if they’ll survive to adulthood. A few weeks back they showed a little kid buried up to his neck on a beach. A wave came in and went right over his head. I’ve seen kids playing with ropes and clotheslines and climbing on tall furniture. There’s gotta be a happy medium between helicopter parenting and “Hey, Jimmy’s on the roof! Get the camera!”