User blog:Le Rottweiler/America’s Shittiest Home Videos

If you require one sample that demonstrates American decadence, America’s Funniest Home Videos is a good start. Before I continue, I need to admit that I haven’t seen this show in a few years, and I certainly haven’t watched it very thoroughly, but you would be in the exact same position if you saw how embarrassing this programme is for everybody involved, including you, the viewer.

Anyway, for any outside readers, the premise is simply this: Americans make some short videos of something occurring, then send them to this show. The makers select some of the videos, put them on the air, and the narrator sometimes makes some ‘funny’ comments while they’re showing. This is an ingenious production method because it requires very little effort from the makers, so little that it makes Seth Green and Seth MacFarlane look laborious in comparison. A significant portion of the videos—probably the vast majority of them—involve either a) somebody getting injured, b) somebody being humiliated, or c) both. I’m not exactly going to judge your intelligence if you like this kind of stuff, but if you find an innocent person suffering funny… I will certainly question your morality, to put it politely.

I looked on‐line to see if this programme was still in production, and I couldn’t fucking believe it: it was. Even in the age of YouTube videos, it just won’t go away, like a piece of shit that won’t flush. My guess is that the audience consists of people who are either too lazy or too ignorant to use the Internet, a medium already filled with shitty videos. Not a perfect explanation but I don’t know how else to explain its continued success. And keep in mind that this show has existed since 1989. Yes, that’s right: 26 fucking years. Very few television shows have ever had such a luxurious lifespan; a lot of genuinely good shows certainly haven’t.

The most outrageous video that I can remember was when a kid was practising with his trumpet in the bathroom. The dickheaded father goes in there with his camera while his son is taking a shit and is trying to practise. He asks what he’s doing with his trumpet, and the kid explains that he was attempting to practise for an event (surprise!). Now if you have any etiquette, you don’t open a fucking bathroom door when the bathroom is obviously occupied. You knock, and you certainly don’t point a video camera at the occupant. What the fuck was he thinking? It’s pretty dickheaded to interrupt somebody’s bathroom time, but to humiliate your kid on national television for a short‐term profit is one of the biggest fuck‐yous that I can think of that a parent can ever give to their own child. The video is supposed to be ‘funny’ because it’s unusual to find somebody using an instrument whilst defecating. For fuck’s sake, he needed to practise. Leave him alone you piss slit. I highly doubt that he wanted that footage sent, and if his parents say otherwise, they’re probably lying anyway.

Anyway, I just desired to get that off of my chest. I rarely see this show mentioned anywhere, but presumably it’s somehow popular enough to survive for decades. I hate America.