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See how I cleverly avoid hitting you on the head with a hammer

Okay, you know how like when your nephew or cousin falls off his skateboard, and he wasn’t wearing padding or a helmet, and his face gets totally bloody and some skin comes off and he gets gravel infused in his skin, and you don’t find it all that funny?

Or, like when you drive past a completely burned up car on the side of the road and your first instinct is not to laugh?

Or, say for instance, your spouse or whomever describes a terrible headache that they’ve had all day. No humor there, right?

So why on Earth would you laugh at the sight of someone’s father falling out of a tree? Or someone’s brother getting kicked in the balls by a little boy? All of the things I have described here result in only one thing: pain. But only in the last paragraph are the situations worthy of showing up on America’s Funniest Videos, now in its sixteenth sympathy-raising season!

True, sometimes on that show they have animals doing cute things, but also true is that the biggest laughs happen when someone gets hit on the head with a hammer or has a similar amount of blinding pain. And I think I am alone on the planet when I don’t laugh. Can someone explain it to me?

I suspect some of you might want to chalk it up to schadenfreude, which I might understand, if you had known those people you see getting hit in the balls, and they had once done you a great wrong.

Now that I think about it, though, I might use watching any given episode of America’s Funniest Videos as a supplemental interview technique when considering hiring software designers. If the interviewee manages to exhibit only sympathy for her fellow humans’ suffering, then she’s hired.

Comments [3]

3 June 2006, 09:27

  1. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that you’re watching it after the fact, so you know that the people it happened to are (most likely) okay. Also, they add funny music and sound effects. :P

    Still, the fact that the show is still on the air is, oh, let’s call it mystifying. I didn’t know anyone actually watched that show….


    — Darren Sussman    3 June 2006, 11:35    #

  2. Being half German and having a native German girlfriend I now completely understand the concept of schadenfreude and it’s no laughing matter. ;)

    What’s interesting is they’ll stand there and laugh as you nearly get killed by your own runaway car rolling over you but even the ones that can be sarcastic as hell don’t get the ironic humor inherent in puns.

    I think the basic principle that made it funny at first was that a large population of Americans grew up loving slapstick comedy and that’s all it is to them… it’s on tv and it’s slapstick comedy.

    Now when the show began if they had just inflicted some terrible pain of some sort on Bob Sagget every week, THAT would have been genuinely funny.


    — Ja    13 June 2006, 05:50    #

  3. i cringe watching the aussie verson (which also liberally steals stuff from the us one because they dont have enough local fodder to use). but i am likely to cringe away from lots of things – i couldnt get through the sequal to Bridget Jones Diary because i was dying from the stupidly humilating things that kept happening to her. >.


    — rebecca    18 June 2006, 10:25    #