America’s Funniest Home Videos

We had various rules regarding the television when I was growing up. They changed some over the years–including the time my parents paid my brothers and I five hundred dollars each to not watch TV for a year–though it usually stuck to something like choosing a show or two per day adding up to no more than an hour of TV. There was a time when my Sunday night show was America’s Funniest Home Videos. I looked forward to watching it as much as I did the Simpsons in later years. I thought AFV–as it’s now known–was so hysterically hilarious that it was impossible for me to comprehend why the rest of my family didn’t think the same.
So tonight by accident, the boys started watching AFV and they seem to agree with my younger self that this show is incredible. They were laughing hysterically, shaking uncontrollably, and then coming in to the kitchen to explain and reenact each hilarious video they watched. Amedeo summed up the shows appeal best by describing one video as “hilarious and painful.”
I’m struck by a number of things watching this same show years later:
1) I was right as a child in thinking that Bob Saget was a terrible, obnoxious host. The obnoxious host now is not nearly as bad as Bob.
2) Hosting this program would send anyone spiraling into heavy drinking and needle drugs.
3) Even with the amount of video recorders in the world today–probably at least ten times what was around when I was a kid? Twenty times?–the ratio of good to bad videos is roughly the same. There is more video being taken and therefore, more bad video.
4) The show still plays a fair amount of old videos. And I mean old as in, from the nineties, maybe even earlier. Seems very peculiar.
Of course I have to include a video now. Supposedly this was video submitted to the show that they couldn’t air. I’m not quite sure why that would be. Thanks to the magic of Youtube, we can all watch!