Bob Saget 2.0 145
theodp writes "Slate makes a pretty convincing argument that YouTube and its knock-offs can trace their roots back to America's Funniest Home Videos." From the article: "The show's stock in trade was to find the lowest common denominator and then hit it in the crotch. Consider this list of select highlights from the show's 'Best of Kids & Animals' DVD: a kid doing a cannonball onto his dad's groin, a baby running into a church pew, a dog peeing on a wedding dress, and a kid clocking his dad in the nuts with a helmet. While these clips are all certainly lowbrow, they've also got something else in common: They're oozing with family values."
Why is 1800 of 2000 trampoline accidents? (Score:4, Funny)
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"What are all these people doing on trampolines?"
That's one of the funniest questions I've seen in a while.
Re:Why is 1800 of 2000 trampoline accidents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why is 1800 of 2000 trampoline accidents? (Score:5, Funny)
The joke?
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But youtube isn't usually funny! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But youtube isn't usually funny! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But youtube isn't usually funny! (Score:5, Funny)
The department which did that must have a higher suicide rate than the russian military!
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Pretty much quantifies Stossel-20/20s piece on American education.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA [youtube.com]
SB
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Re:But youtube isn't usually funny! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well duh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Youtube Wins (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know about that. I've seen some videos on YouTube with worse voice-overs done by someone with far less talent than Bob Saget himself,...
Re:Youtube Wins (Score:4, Funny)
Bob Saget had talent?
Or as I used to called it... (Score:3, Funny)
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You're kidding, right? Bob Saget's stuff is NOTHING like Full House or AFHV. He didn't even write the stuff on AFHV. That was the producers idiocracy trying to keep it a "family show". I've seen Saget live on a few occasions and he's funny. Go to YouTube and look up "Opie and Anthony"... There is some recent stuff with him in it. It's great!
Xserv
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Re:Youtube Wins (Score:5, Informative)
You should see his stand-up. The guy's hilarious, and his stuff is dirty as hell. He just sold out completely for Full House.
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Maybe. Sometimes our anti-biases mechanisms end up fooling us into being biased. I think he'd be hilarious even if I had never heard of him before.
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The writers of his jokes for Whore House and America's Stupid And We Prove It With These Videos, no.
Admittedly not that funny, but it's the first clip I found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj26FG1hLMQ [youtube.com]
His bit in The Aristocrats was a bright spot in an otherwise tedious inside-joke as well.
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No, it didn't. Instead you had to wait for the special "Funniest TV Moments" or "Bestest Music Video" shows that seemed to air every few weeks.
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The collection is determined by the submitters and voted upon by the viewers.
So any attributes we would apply to youtube, should be applied to the public at large. It's like that Carlin skit about voters and politicians...
SB
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One of the points he makes is that without the goofy voiceover and quick cut to a shot of mom hugging the kid, you're really just watching a video of a toddler hurting himself. AFHV upped the dorky and the bland because otherwise you're watching real life, in which people get hurt and their friends stand around laughing with a video camera.
YouTube is to a much greater degree about that depressing reality.
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Internet videos are killing off TV (Score:1)
speaking of... (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS is bob saget 2.0! [youtube.com] (NSFW)
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Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
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This is TOTALLY not safe for work, or the faint of heart or people getting upset about tasteless jokes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_cKCK6Blv0 [youtube.com]
Probably the most tasteless thing you'll see today.
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There go the family jewels... (Score:5, Funny)
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Who are you again? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Makes sense to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe it's a bit juvenile laughing at old people falling over, people getting hit in the crotch, or just general stupidity of people with too much time on your hands, but... AFV is basically a bunch of youtube videos strung together, and is funny no matter what age you are. (Just ignore the lame jokes by the host...)
Sure, there's other content on Youtube that isn't of the "funny video" variety, but... I'd say that the majority of the "viral videos" that get spread around the internet are of the funny variety, and what drives the majority of the site.
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While some clips in AFV were funny, I wouldn't say it was wet-your-pants hilarious. Is it American humor?
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American television executive humor. About as funny as applying for a dog license.
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What about applying for a license for my pet Halibut?
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<lafftrack>ha ha ha ha cough ha ha ha ha</lafftrack>
Re:Makes sense to me (Score:4, Insightful)
A *really* popular sitcom might get a few million people to watch it every night. Out of a population of 400 million, the actual ratio of people who enjoy that humor regularly is tiny.
My guess is that's it's much easier and cheaper to produce crap and get 30% of an already small audience simply by being slightly less crappy than the competition, than it would be to produce something great and attract more people who would usually do something else.
To get a really huge audience, you would need not only to win over the people who think TV sucks, but also the kind of people who watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" religiously. What kind of show would appeal to both sets of people? I certainly don't know.
And as far as AFV goes, the first show ever was hysterical, and it was all downhill from there. Now you're really lucky if it's as funny as a "Cathy" cartoon.
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I laugh at Everybody Loves Eric Raymond [geekz.co.uk], does that count?
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From what I could tell, with my wife and I being married young (19 & 20), and most of our friends up til a couple years ago being single. You have to be married for years to get the jokes, because only after being married for years do you get the reality of the jokes (because you've been there), even if the situations are a bit exaggerated.
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I agree. I never really found it funny when the show was first on the air... but watching reruns with my fiance, we suddenly find it funny. We've been together for over 7 years, and even though we're not married (yet... a month and a half to go), becuase we've been together so long we can see the humor in certain situations becuase we've experienced
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Well, that rules out most of us on /.
-Eric
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Apparently not [ruthlessreviews.com]...
There are a lot of really shitty sitcoms out there. King of Queens anyone? Two and a Half Men? Oh man... Will and Grace?
It's fine that all these shows have unispired contrivances and stolen jokes - we expect nothing else from TV - but all the lines are stolen from Who's The Boss?!
I think every episode of these shows has exactly the same type of set up in it too... You know the line:
$wacky_cousin_or_neighbour ente
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Family Values (Score:1)
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"I seen him!"
I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, when I approach the site's front-end, the "most X" (where X is popular, viewed, voted on, or whatever) lineups are jammed full of webcam clips, in-jokes, and episodes of anime. It's a bizarre disconnect.
Do they know (Score:3, Insightful)
I have wondered how many parents know that their teenage kids are dancing in front of the camera for youtube's global audience.
Old media tries to understand, fails. (Score:1, Insightful)
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Nothing's a strong word. People have a clip they think is funny. They submit it. An audience watches it. The same part of us that finds AFV interesting is the same part that wants us to sift through the YouTube vids and find something funny.
You can find plenty of differences between AFV and YouTube, but to say they have nothing in common is absurd.
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The main thing they don't have in common is that youtube's content isn't decided upon by a small bunch of Hollywood television show producers. It's just there for the viewing. I'm not saying that makes most of it better, but it certainly is more diverse.
SB
The connection is price (Score:1, Interesting)
Slate wrong.....it IS AFV (Score:3, Interesting)
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All of the videos on America's Funniest Home Videos were copyrighted too. Like before they were submitted even. Amazing, huh?
Yes copyright is one of the few things left that regular people can have without a board of directors approval.
For now.
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I can guarantee you they gave up every single right in their video when they submitted it to AFV.
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..and the article links to, errr, exactly this video.
The point was that home-video voyeurism started off with America's Funniest Videos, and that YouTube is a "natural" successor to its crown.
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So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
And while I'm at it, why say "YouTube and its knock-offs", YouTube wasn't exactly the first site where one can post homevideos. YouTube is a knock-off which just happens to be the biggest.
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The purpose of historical analyses such as the ones you mention is to demonstrate that, a) it isn't a recent phenomenon, and b) understand why we do certain things. That is, I think the real insight here is on analysing what home-videos "sell" (ie, become popular) and why, and not in merely saying that AFV was the first.
BOB SAGET IS SATAN INCARNATE! (Score:2, Funny)
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-ed
Bob Saget 2.0? (Score:2, Funny)
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Actually, he has a bit about the various snuff movies he enjoyed that were sent in to America's Funniest. There's some seriously messed up stuff in there.
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German TV shows clips from youtube and co (Score:2, Informative)
blasphemy! because: www.bobsagetisgod.com (Score:3, Funny)
There's something potentially better about youtube (Score:4, Interesting)
However, the interesting thing about youtube is that with few exceptions, it is a relatively unfiltered medium. There is no marketing department behind the scenes deciding what it thinks you'll like. You pick the stuff you do find interesting, and ignore the stuff you don't. I would agree that it's a somewhat tedious process sometimes, but what's nice about the way that youtube is structured is that what started out as a dead end (something uninteresting), can sometimes lead you to something very worthwhile via the associated links that show up, or responses that people other members have posted.
My only gripe really is that I wish people would observe a bare minimum of what makes a watchable video - shooting in near-complete darkness isn't one of them, nor is movement that makes it look like the one holding the camera is having a grand mal seizure.
New slogan for YouTube (Score:5, Funny)
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Or people who recognize it as Geocities/Angelfire 2.0
The concept is good. The execution is horrible. Myspace gives users far too much freedom to destroy their pages with animated backgrounds, unreadable color schemes, and 50 different videos all set to automatically start playing when the page is opened.
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I find it quite funny that people (not specifically talking about you) who talk about freedom in software consider freedom a bad thing when applied to normal people making web pages.
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everything I learned about america (Score:4, Funny)
Think about it.
Somethings missing here... (Score:2)
Links?
VideoSift, VideoBomb, etc. (Score:2)
Video killed... (Score:2)
Then has Internet Killed the Video [TV] Star?
Of course, radio and television haven't been killed off. What does one listen to in the car? Streaming audio from the internet? Some do, perhaps, but a lot just listen to a local radio station, or XM. When one gets home after a long day and wants to unwind, do they fire up the computer and surf youtube or other sites? An increasing number do, myself included sometimes, but probably not more than the number of folks who
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Why, yes, yes it did...
http://www.poptix.net/funny/videostar.swf [poptix.net]
Beyond You Tube: Go Fish (Score:2)
Most of the videos suck. Most of them are
"Hi! My name is Bennifer and I have a great sense of humor, and like to have fun."
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZ Z Z
But some are really amazing.
One woma
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Re:GCD, LCM (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, lowest common denominator is okay. For instance, when adding the fractions 1/6, 2/3, and 4/18, you could convert all the fractions to a denominator of 54, as in 9/54, 27/54, and 12/54. But the correct procedure is to convert them to a denominator of 18, as in 3/18, 9/18, and 4/18 (16/18, or 8/9). And the lowest common denominator is only 1 if the numbers are all integers. You can't express 1/6 as a fraction of integers with a denominator of 1.
For more, see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
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...a technicality, but yes. Of course, some would say that isn't a fraction of integers, but two fractions of integers, but whatever.
At least you read the post. The mods somehow found it "+5 Funny" to talk fractions.
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Problem 1)
Find the lowest common denominator between 1/2 and 1/3.
Answer: 1
Bzzzt. Please try again.
Find the lowest common demoninator between 1/3 and 1/5.
Answer: 1
Bzzzt. Please try again.
Find the lowest common denominator between 1/5 and 1/7.
Answer: 1
Bzzzt. Please go back to 4th Grade.
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Since E is a common denominator, any multiple of E is also a common denominator. Let N be a natural number. NE is also a common
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Ben