This Friday, America's Funniest Home Videos airs its 16th season finale (ABC, May 19, 8 p.m.) and becomes the longest-running prime-time entertainment program in ABC history. It's lasted longer than NYPD Blue, Roseanne and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and ties Law & Order for longevity among prime-time shows still on the air. But while Law & Order is an Emmy-nominated, critically acclaimed cultural phenomenon with several spin-offs, AFHV is most often the butt of jokes, considered moronic and uncouth, below even many crass reality shows. It's tough to find someone willing to admit in front of others that they watch and enjoy the show. Many aren't even aware that it's still producing new episodes.
But despite its overwhelming cheesiness and predictability (will that guy standing next to a kid swinging a bat get hit in the crotch?), AFHV was actually rather prescient and groundbreaking. When it first premiered with original host Bob Saget (then at the height of his popularity as the wholesome dad on Full House) in 1990, YouTube and MySpace didn't exist, the term "viral" generally referred only to diseases and watching video online was impossible. Sixteen years later, short, bizarre, home-made video clips are the newest pop-culture sensation, and many of them resemble exactly the kind of things that people have been sending in to AFHV (and its short-lived spin-off, America's Funniest People) for years.
VH1 and E! have launched shows in the last few months showcasing the oddball found videos that make their way around the internet via blogs, MySpace bulletins and e-mail forwards. At least half of these videos feature idiots doing stupid things so you can laugh at them, which is the backbone of AFHV. Most of these videos are meant to be appreciated in a detached, ironic way, and many feature the kind of explicit content that the family-friendly AFHV would never touch. But the same cutting-edge Internet geeks who spend hours online looking at obscure videos of Chinese dudes lip-synching to Backstreet Boys songs wouldn't be caught dead watching even a minute of AFHV.
On the other hand, the people who do watch the show have probably never heard of YouTube and still have dial-up Internet connections. In that way, AFHV's collection of homemade entertainment is uniquely subversive: Often slipped in among the umpteenth clip of a cute cat doing something adorable is a weird prank or a bizarre parody, the kind of thing that would find a whole different audience if packaged with a snarky intro by a D-list comedian on VH1.
Not every jaded hipster is too cool for AFHV, though. Last year, I interviewed Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, the creators of the Found Footage Festival, a traveling exhibition of random home videos, training films and other strange video ephemera. Former writers for The Onion, both expressed a deep, unironic admiration for AFHV. "There's a primal comedy to it that's undeniable," Prueher told me. "Whether you fancy yourself a highbrow sort of person or not, it's hard to watch some of those videos and not laugh."
Ultimately, what it comes down to is pretty basic: Watching people get hit in the groin is funny. With current host Tom Bergeron, the king of inoffensiveness (he also hosts Dancing with the Stars), AFHV has gotten away from the relentless shtickery of Saget's voiceovers and embraced simplicity. As long as there are people falling down in comical ways, and other people around to film it, there's no reason the show couldn't last another 16 seasons.