Travesty at AFV

When I am feeling especially dull, I like to watch America’s Funniest Videos http://abc.go.com/primetime/americasfunniest/index.html There is nothing funnier than a piñata mishap or drunken wedding guests on the dance floor. I really like the videos of animals and children in spontaneous situations. That Tom Bergeron really puts me at my ease. He has three shows, you know, such is his range as a showman.

Some of the videos seem staged to me. Sure, you just happened to have a video camera on the guys building a shed when the walls collapsed on them. Everybody tapes shed construction, don’t they? A lot of the ones with kids seem really contrived to me. You know the ones, where some too cute to be true kid is set up for maximum adorableness. I’d much rather see candid shots of kids being their funny selves while going about their business.

Last week, there was a special contest on location at Disney World, complete with creepy Disney characters, to determine the funniest video ever. First prize was a quarter of a million bucks. The winner? A woman with her infant quadruplet (maybe it was quintuplets) girls who laughed on cue to their dad’s funny face making. Adorable? You bet. Funniest video ever? You have got to be kidding me. The laughing babies were up against a dachshund who grabbed a lit roman candle and ran amok through a neighborhood while the candle spewed fire at horrified onlookers. That was way funnier than the laughing quads but not even close to being the funniest of all time. The third finalist was apparently not memorable, since I don’t remember it.
As is usually the case, my candidate did not even make the finals. The funniest video ever was a chimpanzee who inserted his finger into his anus, sniffed it, then pretended to faint. What were the producers of AFV thinking? That video had all the comic elements: lower primate, finger in butt, and mock fainting.