"You know I like to think of my job as holding a mirror up to the face of America. I don't... offer to help you shave, or comb your hair. Or check for cellulite. I just hold the mirror. Look at yourselves."
—Tom Bergeron, on the show
America's Funniest Home Videos, often abbreviated as AFV, is a long-running television series that features home video clips sent in by viewers. It has aired on ABC since its debut as a special in November 1989. At the end of most episodes, the producers pick three clips for the studio audience to vote on for prizes of $4,000, $6,000, and $20,000note ; the big money winner goes on to compete with other weekly winners for a $100,000 prize later in the season.
The show can be considered the proto-Reality Show concept, as it existed through audience interaction. AFV has gone through three "eras", being originally hosted by comedian Bob Saget until 1997, then by Daisy Fuentes and John Fugelsang from 1997-99. Over 1999-2000 it existed as occasional specials rather than a regular series, but it returned to the old format in 2001 with Tom Bergeron as host and has remained an ABC fixture since. (A lot of people are only familiar with the Bob Saget version, which is odd since the Bergeron version has since surpassed the Saget version in terms of seasons, not to mention the Bergeron episodes were the only ones that ever aired on ABC until his retirement. And the show is heavily promoted, so you'd have to have lived under a rock since the late 1990s to not know it was still on with a different host.)
After fifteen long years, Tom Bergeron announced his retirement as the series host. His final show aired on May 17, 2015. Many were still sad to see Tom go, though, as it felt like an end of an era for the series, and with AFV having slowly been losing grounds to Internet video sites such as YouTube over the years, many were concerned where the series may be heading. On May 22, 2015, it was announced on the YouTube AFV channel that Alfonso Ribeiro (Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) would take over as host, and he's seen the show into its 30th season as of 2019.
It has been described as the ur-YouTube (or the ur-FAIL Blog
, in some aspects), only with more Bob Saget.
From 1990-94, ABC aired a Spin-Off titled America's Funniest People, which focused on everyday people showing off their humorous talents, plus staged sketches by a small in-house team. Like AFV, it was hosted by a Full House alumnus; Dave Coulier in this case. Other spin-offs include World's Funniest Videos (also hosted by Coulier and featured clips sent in from around the world), Videos After Dark (a failed adult-oriented version hosted by Saget that aired in March 2019), and America's Funniest Home Videos: Animal Edition (an animal-oriented version that started airing on Nat Geo Wild in June 2021, with Ribeiro continuing to host).
This show provides examples of:
- The Announcer: ABC staff announcer Ernie Anderson was the announcer until his death in 1997, except for a few episodes in Seasons 1 and 2 where Charlie O'Donnell (Wheel of Fortune, American Bandstand) filled in for him. Gary Owens (best known for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In) announced the show from 1995 to 1997, followed by an unidentified announcer in Fuentes and Fugelsang's first season, and voice actor Jess Harnell took over in the tenth season.
- Appliance Defenestration:
- One clip has two guys putting an extra large TV out a second story window of their house as Tom remarks, "I'm sure a lot of people feel like doing this when our show gets preempted."
- In another clip, a woman frustrated by her printer proceeds to throw it piece by piece off the deck rail as her husband films.
- Animated Credits Opening: The opening sequence of Saget's final season had a family growing out of a couch.
- Anticipatory Breath Spray: One memorable clip in Season One had a groom do this right before he kissed the bride.
- Artistic License: A really bad, unintentional example. Bergeron identifies a porcupine as a beaver in a 2014 episode.
- Artistic License – Physics: Invoked. During a game of "Head, Gut, or Groin", for a clip of a man diving off a diving board into a pool, a female audience member guessed he would hit his head on the diving board, even though his head was far away from it. Tom Bergeron asked her, "What was your grade in physics?"
- Awesome, but Impractical: One hilarious video featured a little boy dressed as Gumby for Halloween. As adorable as it was, it was incredibly difficult to move in: as well as moving slowly, he was even unable to make it up a single step and eventually toppled over.
- Balloonacy: In the first $100,000 show of Season 8 Bob Saget gives a boy named Marcello a bunch of balloons from the set. He winds up drifting skyward and apparently to Paris. At the end when a stagehand hands him the winning result, he does the same to him to send him to Frankfurt.
- Banana Peel: In one segment, Tom introduces a series of clips on pratfalls by eating a banana and then tossing the peel on the floor calling it a "good source of pratfalls". However, none of the clips featured involve pratfalls induced by a banana peel.
- Biting-the-Hand Humor: An unusual, downplayed case — the show has myriad enforced plugs for ABC's corporate parent Disney (see below), but aside from grand prize shows Disney hasn't stopped it from running home videos that don't paint the Disney Theme Parks in the best light, such as costumed characters falling off of parade floats or scaring toddlers, and a memorable clip of The Hall of Presidents's Abraham Lincoln animatronic slowly falling backwards at the waist during his big speech. Even better, one season finale shot at Disney World had Bergeron joke that when his daughters go there, the three things they're most excited to see are "Mickey, Minnie, and Daddy's Wallet." Most likely the reason they're okay with it is because it's free advertisement for their theme parks and the videos just show silly things happen that can happen anywhere, rather than making the parks look bad.
- Boring, but Practical: Let your average Joe send in their funny home movies with the chance to win money from it, and you have one of the longest running American TV Programs in network history. Even with the rise of the internet, this format is still so incredibly cheap to make that even with the decreased ratings, season 33 could still double the amount of prize money with little issue. The wide appeal of just seeing every average day people in funny situations is a strong one, to the point New York Times proclaimed: "if you could pick a safe show that appeals to almost everyone, this might be it".
- Calling Your Bathroom Breaks: The famous clip "Whiney the Poo" features a kid singing and dancing a Christmas tune on camera. He stops suddenly and whines before shouting "I need to go poo-poo!"
- The Cameo: Jill Colucci, who sang the theme song, appeared in the opening segment of a Season 2 episode.
- Canon Discontinuity: The show itself seems to take the stance that the Fuentes/Fugelsang era never happened.
- Censor Box: This family friendly show can have adult nudity, teenage nudity and child nudity... because Naked People Are Funny. Censor boxes or blurring are used at those times.
- Chroma Key: In a Season 8 episode Saget clearly appears to be chroma-keyed onto the set instead of physically standing there. Remarking that the producers are making him do weirder and weirder things he suddenly rotates sideways and appears to be floating on set.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Between Season 5 and 7, Bob had an animated sidekick named "Stretchy McGillicuddy" who would appear on a TV in-studio to taunt Bob. This was quickly dropped and he was not referenced afterward.
- Confetti Drop: $100,000 winners are traditionally showered with loads of confetti and streamers at the end of the $100,000 episodes. In the Saget era, balloons were dropped on winners.
- Cool Old Guy: Tom was becoming this towards the end of his run.
- Couch Gag: The Bob Saget era briefly showed a different family near the studio audience (after the theme song) watching the show (one episode even went as far as showing a caveman family). Saget once joked that it was the same family and they actually live in the studio. Alfonso Ribeiro has sort of created his own couch gag, in that after Jess Harnell announces his name, Alfonso walks down the steps and then performs a different dance each time.
- Deadpan Snarker: Tom Bergeron, often.
- The Ditz:
- Why would you tape yourself throwing rocks at a hornets nest, or just walk up point-blank to a nest inside a tree?
- Recurring bits that happened Once an Episode during Tom's run included "Nincompoop Corner" and "The Department of Duh" which featured people of this sorts exclusively.
- Dude, Not Funny!: Invoked in some cuts to the audience. At the end of a clip montage of people getting hurt, audience members will sometimes elicit such reactions.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Quite a few, given the show's longevity and evolution from a one-off to a full series.
- The introductory special episode had quite a few differences:
- Saget had a co-host, Kellie Martin, who at the time was playing Becca Thatcher on Life Goes On.
- The grand prize in the original special was $5,000, instead of $10,000 for 1st place, $3,000 for 2nd place, and $2,000 for 3rd place. Also, the producers voted on the videos and not the audience.
- Bob did not interview the audience at any point.
- After a clip of a young boy dancing was shown, said boy (Lake Fletcher Jr.) made an in-studio appearance, dancing to "Dial My Heart" by The Boys. In-studio performances like this never happened during the actual series.
- The show's logo appeared on a television set against a sky-like background with yellow star wipes, and the logo appeared on a title card at the start of each segment. For the rest of the Saget run, the logo was inside a blue circle with the familiar "stars and stripes" animation, and segments were usually introduced with shots of the audience and/or the logo at the back of the set.
- Because the show premiered as a mid-season replacement, there was only one $100,000 special during its first season. Subsequent seasons usually have three specials, one for each Sweeps month (November, February, and May). Likely in relation, the first $100,000 special was an hour long.
- Balloons were dropped instead of confetti and streamers during the Saget era.
- In the first season, Saget ended each episode by sitting down in the recliner. After that, each episode ended with him leaving the set from the same door he entered from.
- The first two seasons had the intro sequence starting instantaneously. Beginning in season 3, a funny video was shown to set the tone for the rest of the episode, followed by said intro sequence.
- Several portions of theme song that would never appear again beginning in season 3 were used in the first two seasons.
- Saget announced the top three winners in numerical order (number one, number two, number three), before dropping this about halfway through the first season.
- The backdrop was purple in the first two seasons; it became blue in Season Three.
- The drumroll announcing the grand prize winner was higher pitched in Season One.
- Tom Bergeron's first season as host has this too. The set doesn't have the slick neon design, there were fewer monitors, Bergeron's hair is black instead of grey, he tried to make silly voices over the videos much like Bob Saget did, the audience members dressed much more casually than they do now, Jess Harnell didn't draw out Bergeron's first name, and perhaps the most startling of all, Bergeron occasionally did a lot of Biting-the-Hand Humor; making jokes about how he's only hosting this show because he can't get work elsewhere, or that he's waiting for a better break to come by. You'd never hear him make a joke like that on his later episodes.
- The introductory special episode had quite a few differences:
- Enforced Plug: In the Bergeron era, there was plenty of shilling for the show's website, where videos can be viewed and/or posted for future contests, as well as the occasional visit from performers from other ABC reality shows (such as Dancing with the Stars, also hosted by Bergeron). Above all: the constant hyping of Disney Theme Parks, since Disney owns ABC and most grand prizes now include trips to them or whatever their newest vacation venture is. That means that several episodes, usually season finales, were filmed at the hyped locales and had Bergeron visiting the rides and whatnot. There were also segments during non-event shows that were nothing more than ads for Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, and clips "presented" by Denny's, Pepperidge Farm, etc. The Ribeiro era still has a goodly deal of Disney hype and references to the website, but it's been a while since an actual visit to the parks.
- In the show's beginning, the consolation prizes were RCA products like TVs, camcorders and VCRs (and promoted as such), which was ironic because RCA was formerly the longtime owner of rival network NBC, but by Season 2 all three winners got cash (probably because it was redundant to give runner-ups cameras and VCRs, along with the usual travel costs for contestants to LA being not so worth it for a near-$900 prize you had to pay taxes on), while the RCA plugs were edited out of the syndicated versions, giving the revisionist effect that the runners-up got nothing in Season 1.
- The Faceless: The offscreen assistant who would hand Bob the voting results toward the end of every episode. Also a Butt-Monkey, as Bob would spout witty insults at this person's expense.
- Foregone Conclusion: If a baby/toddler/little kid make it to the finals, go ahead and change the channel - they're probably going to win. Especially if said child is behaving like a complete brat.
- The younger, the better with this trope. And if it isn't the child...well, it's the dog. It will always. Be. The dog. Unless if the adults do something unique that really riots up laughter from the audience.
- Foreign Remake: It's based on a segment from the Japanese show Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan. An Australian version was launched soon after. It and other sister versions, particularly from Europe, have provided clips to the American show on occasion.
- A Peruvian version was attempted, but with only one episode made. And by the channel that aired the original show!
- A Russian version, called roughly "Self-made Director", exists since 1992 and isn't going to disappear anytime soon.
- A UK version, similarly based on the Japanese original, is You've Been Framed!, which became a huge hit for ITV after it began in 1990 and ran right up until 2022. The original host was Jeremy Beadle, who was succeeded in 1998 by Emmerdale actress Lisa Riley in 1998 then briefly by Jonathan Wilkesnote in 2003. From 2004 the show did away with onscreen presenters and was instead narrated, offscreen, by comedian and actor Harry Hill (of TV Burp fame) for almost two decades thereafter until it was axed in 2023 after some 530 episodes and dozens of specials. Remarkably, the flat payment of £250 for each video clip used remained the same throughout the entirety of the show's 32-year existence.
- From Special to Series: It began as an hour-long special hosted by Bob Saget and Kellie Martin in November 1989; it was brought back as a weekly series two months later with Saget in tow, and has aired ever since with three host changes since then (with the minor exception of a period from 1999-2001, when in an inversion of this trope, it was reduced to a series of specials).
- Groin Attack: One of the staples of this show is clips of people on the receiving end of this - usually from a ball, but occasionally other projectile such as baseball bats. In fact, because of how common these clips are, they get special consideration during playings of "Head, Gut, or Groin?" in which audience members are selected to guess where people in three clips will be hit (head, gut, or groin).
- One particularly painful clip involves a man horse-playing with his young son on the floor. At one point, the boy asks his father if he wants to play alligator, to which his father asks, "What's alligator?" The boy answers the question by getting on his hands and knees and biting his father's crotch.
- Early on in the show’s run, a video of a woman accidentally kicking another woman in the crotch managed to come in second place.
- Guest Host: When the show was reduced to a series of one-offs in 1999-2001, it didn't have a permanent host. Some of the hosts during this era included Stuart Scott, Richard Kind, a pre-fame Steve Carell and even Tom Bergeron. Also, Mike and Kerri Kasem (children of the legendary Casey Kasem) hosted a season for foreign markets in 1999 and 2000.
- History Repeats: Tom Bergeron had started off as a semi-known host from Boston and previously seen during the "interactive" days of FX, before being picked to head up the 1998 revival of The Hollywood Squares and then this show. Come 2015, and Alfonso Ribero becomes host- slightly different path before, but he had also hosted a revival of a Merrill Heatter game show (in this case, Catch 21), and then this show.
- Home Game: Two of them: a VHS game in 1990 and a DVD game in 2007. Both came with a collection of clips, and players competed by answering questions related to the clips or voting on which ones they liked the most.
- Idiosyncratic Wipes: The Saget era's introduction sequence opened with a wipe resembling a camera lens, and then cut from clip to clip with wives vaguely resembling the American flag: red and white strips sliding from the sides, stars from the top, and a blue square from the bottom.
- I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham: Inverted in "The Kumquat Kid" where a boy says he likes to eat kumquats. He starts eating one, but he finds it to be too sour. He eventually spits it out.
- Inflation Negation: The cash prizes of $10,000 for the winner, $3,000 for second place and $2,000 for third were unchanged from 1990 to 2022. They were doubled in Season 33.
- Jeopardy! Thinking Music: One clip features a man performing this with a bicycle pump and hand farts.
- Jump Scare: Later episodes seem to have clips featuring them Once per Episode. Screamer Pranks are the most common.
- Kids Hate Vegetables: An early grand-prize-winning video showed a young girl hiding vegetables in her napkin. She tells her off-screen parent “I ate three carrots and three celery.” “You’re not lying to me, are you?” “No.”
- Laughing at Your Own Jokes: Bob Saget tended to do this in his stint as the host.
- Lovely Assistant: Daisy Fuentes.
- Man of a Thousand Voices: Bob Saget's run had him do dubs of the videos with a respectable range of funny voices, which pretty much defined his era as host.
- MST: Especially with Saget. In fact, two of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers (Trace Beaulieu and J. Elvis Weinstein) went on to write for AFV from the Fuentes/Fugelsang era through the first few Bergeron seasons.
- Mood Whiplash: On January 9, 2022, ABC News broke into the end of an episode of AFV to announce that former host Bob Saget had died.
- Muppet Cameo:
- A 2005 episode made in promotion of The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, where Fozzie does the announcements and Tom Bergeron goofs around with Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo.
- A 2010 episode subtitled "Muppet-Palooza", in which Kermit helps Tom host and accidentally proposes to Miss Piggy, the Electric Mayhem (sans Lips) perform music, Kermit and Pepe participate in a game of "So You Think You Know Videos", the Swedish Chef prepares meatballs, and Beaker gets electrocuted during a demonstration of a Laugh-o-Meter.
- Mythology Gag: During a 2010 episode in which The Muppets guest star, the Swedish Chef hits some meatballs with a tennis racket, a call back to his first appearance on The Muppet Show in which he does the exact same thing.
- Niche Network: One of Tom's episodes had him showing clips to demonstrate how there was literally a channel on TV for everything. Flipping through the clips he shows "Polka Planet", "The Belly Button Network", "The Fashion Channel", "The Chiropractor Channel", "Toilet TV", and "Tin Ear TV".
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: The season 25 finale, Tom Bergeron's last episode as host, has him get on a golf cart driven by Bob Saget and drive off into the night, planning on doing something new.
- Once an Episode:
- Saget almost always signed off with a joke beginning with the phrase "And honey..." (except for the tail end of his run; see below).
- For the Fuentesang era, there was "The Book of Why"; eg. "Why practice makes perfect." (Guy hits a golf ball straight up into the air and catches it in a hat)
- The Bad News: [clip with unfortunate outcome] The Good News: [optimistic joke regarding said outcome]
- During Bergeron's first season, he would do a segment he called, "Ask Tom Stuff", where he would read off questions supposedly sent to him (but are so ridiculous, you pretty much know they're made up for the show), and he would offer his advice for the askers in the form of videos.
- Bergeron did slo-mo replays of the "honorable mentions" from each show, in a spoof of inspiring montages.
- Vs.: There are two groups of videos each with a common theme. One video is shown from the first theme, then another from the other theme. This goes back and forth, and a "winner" is declared.
- Nincompoop Corner
- One season or two had "The Naughty File", which featured clips that were usually either somewhat more questionable than you would normally see on the show, or little kids or pets doing something they would get in trouble for.
- About halfway through Tom Bergeron's tenure, a segment would appear midway through the show where he would play an interactive game with audience members. Games included "Head, Gut, or Groin", "What's Behind The Big Blue Blob?", and "Who's Making That Racket?"
- Also about halfway through Bergeron's run, the segment "Name That Sound" appeared, where only the audio portion for a video played before the full video was shown.
- Beginning early on in Tom's run and lasting through most of his run was "Tom's Home Movies" where Tom's head would be superimposed over the head of somebody else from an old clip, most of the time the person something comical actually happened to.
- Starting midway through Tom's run was "Dog Park" which featured only videos of dogs.
- "A Moment With..." which features a text description of something very strange followed by one very short clip of what was described.
- Ribiero has "This One Time on AFV" where he shows one clip and makes its events into a story.
- Ribiero also has "Throwback Thursday (But on a Sunday)" where he shows a series of older clips. This was re-named "Memory Lane" starting in Season 33.
- Another Ribero bit is "I Think I See The Problem", where Ribero points out things that people have failed to notice before it's too late just before (or occasionally after) pratfalls happen.
- A recurring bit during Ribiero's run wherein one or more people (usually kids) send in a video requesting specific sorts of clips (i.e. a montage of beach videos, a montage of cat videos, etc.) was promoted to a once-per-episode segment called "Hey, Alfonso!" in Season 30.
- Once a Season:
- The Slo-Mo Gizmo, which allows the host to analyze a particularly spectacular mishap in detail.
- Each season usually ends with each of the winners from the season gathering together to compete for the $100,000 prize at the end of the season.
- During the Saget era, a musical montage set to "Freeze Frame".
- Later in the Bergeron era, the show would travel to one of the various different Disneyland locations around the world, where Tom would try and soak up the local culture, in a comical fashion. Otherwise, we would return to the original Disneyland, where Tom would let his inner child loose, and worm his way into different rides and attractions, or mingle with the costumed characters of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto.
- Pretentious Pronunciation: A clip in the season 28 finale has a young boy frustrated with his father who is insistently calling carrots "cay-rots".
- Previously on…: Parodied in the Bergeron era — for several seasons, each episode opened with him intoning "Previously on AFV..." and a quick montage of particularly silly clips from the actual previous episode followed.
- Product Placement: In addition to Enforced Plug above, the producers seem to like it when people send in videos featuring their misadventures at Disney's theme parks, including one which won $100,000. These even appeared in the Saget era with a video catching the Abraham Lincoln animatronic malfunctioning at The Hall of Presidents!
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: A classic early clip featured Carlos Jones, a black boy with a pronounced accent who shouted out the alphabet letter by letter. ("Aeh! Beh! Ceh! Deh!", etc.)
- Rearrange the Song: "The Funny Things You Do" has five mixes:
- The pilot episode used a mellower instrumentation and had a guitar solo not present in later versions. It was also instrumental until the end.
- The most familiar version (1990-96) beefed up the instrumentation a bit with a larger horn section, and used the vocals in the intro as well.
- For Saget's last season, the track was re-orchestrated into a higher key with vocals by Peter Hix (who had previously sung the America's Funniest People theme) and Terry Wood, along with an electric guitar solo.
- The Fuentes/Fugelsang era introduced a more ska-sounding instrumental version with no vocals, which carried over to the Bergeron era.
- Ribeiro got another remix which, while still instrumental, has a similar arrangement to the Colucci theme.
- Rewind Gag: This show sometimes likes to do backward video montages.
- Rule of Cute: Clips of cute kittens, puppies, and especially cute babies have a high chance of winning, even if they're not particularly funny.
- Running Gag: See also Groin Attack.
- Both Bergeron and Ribeiro frequently joke about how pinatas and trampolines remain popular despite/in spite of all the havoc they've caused over the years, as borne out by all the clips of them Gone Horribly Wrong.
- Sampling: During Tom's final show, they aired a brief sequence where they remixed a lot of his famous lines from the show into a song using auto tune.
- Shout-Out: Plenty given the nature of the show, including the occasional
Genius Bonus.- This line from Tom Bergeron:
- In one clip that went viral on Vine, a little girl is watching The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! on an iPad and falling asleep, until her dog's bark wakes her back up.
- Signing-Off Catchphrase: Bob Saget would always say "Keep those cameras safely rolling" and follow it up with "And honey... [insert comment to wife here]." Tom Bergeron's was "If you get it on tape, you could get it in cash" and was later changed to "Upload to us, get rich, get famous." Ribeiro uses "Send your video to me, get yourself on TV."; he occasionally lampshades this after he says the line.
- The Daisy Fuentes and John Fugelsang episodes ended with the much less memorable "If you get it in the groin, you could get it in coin". Very clearly reworked into Bergeron's original Signing Off Catch Phrase.
- Single-Minded Twins: Bergeron lampshaded this in one episode, where he sat between a pair of twins in the audience; whenever he would ask one of them a question, they both would begin to answer, prompting him to turn to the other and yell at her to shut up, followed by him turning to the camera with a creeped-out look on his face.
- Slapstick: Most of the humor falls into this sort of category. This includes:
- Musical Slapstick Montage: Every show has at least one; in the Bergeron and Ribeiro eras there are usually two. One uses a radio favorite (old or new), and one uses an instrumental, usually a public domain classical piece.
- The Pratfall: Countless amateur versions have been displayed.
- Splitting Pants: One video titled "Weightlifter pants split" shows a guy from behind squatting with a barbell on his shoulders. At the end of the video, he squats, and the back of his pants rips open.
- Spin-Off:
- America's Funniest People ran from 1990-94 and was hosted by Dave Coulier — another Full House performer — and a female co-host (Arleen "Harley Quinn" Sorkin from 1990-92, Tawny Kitaen from 1992-94). The videos sent in to this show were of people intentionally being funny, and combined the clips with appearances by comedians and original Sketch Comedy segments.
- Coulier later hosted a shorter-lived spinoff, The World's Funniest Videos.
- Producer Vin Di Bona repackaged clips from both Funniest Home Videos and Funniest People for Fox Family Channel's Show Me the Funny and syndication's That's Funny.
- Saget returned to host an adult-oriented version called Videos After Dark that aired in 2019... which went belly-up after a single two-part episode.
- In 2021, Nat Geo Wild began airing Animal Edition, focusing on wildlife and pet-related videos.
- Split Screen: Used in the Saget era: after announcing the third-place winner, the first- and second-place winners would be shown in an angled split-screen effect.
- Stock Sound Effects: During the Saget era, it was common for clips to have wacky sound effects dubbed in, such as "boing"s and slide whistles. The "clang" from Family Feud even made a few appearances.
- Studio Audience:
- They vote on the videos, not to mention their reactions to the clips usually outro (and sometimes break into) many of the packages.
- In the Saget era, the voting would have additional panels via satellite from the studios of ABC affiliates in other cities to encourage them to promote the show.
- Because of COVID-19 precautions, for the 2020-21 season, AFV opted to using a virtual audience with audience members participating through Zoom being shown on multi-pattern video screens placed throughout the studio.
- This Loser Is You: Most likely the main appeal of the show, and the reason people have kept on watching. Even lampshaded in the original theme song: "America, America, this is you!"
- Three-Dimensional Episode: Which also happened to be a Full House Reunion Show during an ABC 3-D gimmick week! Incredible awkwardness ensued as poor Saget had to toss objects at the screen to indulge the annoying gimmick while everyone else was there to see the freaking cast of Full House for the first time in two years after the show's cancellation. Oh, and it was also Saget's second-to-last episode.
- Tick Tock Tune: A short instrumental piece with electronic ticking sounds would play as the bumper before the final commercial break, while the audience was seen voting on their favorite videos and the announcer teased the reveal during Saget's run.
- Transatlantic Equivalent: In the UK, there's the ITV show You've Been Framed!, which similarly went on as long, running from 1990 to 2023. The main difference (aside from the obvious host, clips and presentation difference) is that apart from in an early series, no competition for the best clip is held, instead giving £250 to everyone who has their clip shown on the show.
- Trash the Set: In one of Saget's episodes, he finds that he cannot enter the set by the usual door because the set is filled by boxes, so he opts to bust one of the windows in the background and enter through that.
- Uranus Is Showing: The clip with the mom trying to get the kid to say 'Uranus' during a planet quiz, and he kept saying "my anus" instead.
- Another kid can recite the names of all the planets, but prefers not to mention Uranus, because people always laugh at that.
Often clips include...
- Amusing Injuries: Nearly every episode can be guaranteed to have clips of someone getting injured in some comedic fashion, to the point that it is often one of the first things people remember about the show.
- Camera Abuse: Although more often than not it was to the camera operator rather than the camera itself.
- Caught on Tape: Some videos fell under this, whether it was a mouse stealing from a kitchen jar or a kid making a fish sing.
- Epic Fail: It was practically Failblog (or at least the video portions of Failblog) before there was a Failblog.
- Groin Attack: Very much present in the early episodes, and still frequent today. One milestone show in the Bergeron era counted down "The Greatest Groin Hits".
- Indeed, if you ask your average "man on the street" to describe the prototypical AFHV clip, they'll probably say something like "guy getting whacked in the crotch by a golf club."
- They've made an audience game of it: "Head, Gut, or Groin", which shows the start of a clip and has the contestants predict who's going to get hit where.
- One season opening had Bergeron pointing out how many groin hits they had aired so far (some several thousand). The average was "about seven and a half groin hits per show, which begs the question who is that poor man with half a groin, and why do people keep hitting him there?
- And of course the Daisy Fuentes and John Fugelsang episodes signed off with the phrase "If you get it in the groin, you could get it in coin", showing that everyone on the production was aware of it.
- Genre Blind: If you see someone on a bike on a slope very near you, or get a pinata, you'd know to move, right? Well, not so much, even if they see it coming from a mile away.
- Literal-Minded: In one video, a mother tapes her little boy enjoying a sucker. The mother then tells her son to offer to give his sister a lick. Guess what the boy does?
- Mall Santa: Christmas-season episodes truck out unfortunate experiences with faux-Santas at the mall and elsewhere. A popular early clip had a kid comment "Boy, do you have bad breath!" to one.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Bob would usually find some excuse to work in a Sylvester Stallone or Jerry Lewis vocal impersonation Once an Episode.
- Rule of Pool: To the point that another audience game ("Who's Going In?") is based around it. It's not always a pool, though — any body of water big enough for a good fully-clothed dunk will do.
- School Play: Amateur plays are a constant provider of collapsing sets, stumbling performers, unruly dogs, etc. to this show.
- Singing in the Shower: One clip in the UK show You've Been Framed featured a child singing loudly in the shower, and his reaction when he opened the shower door, and saw he was being filmed (presumably by a parent).
- Thing-O-Meter: An early series of the UK show picked out the best three clips from the show, for which the audience would vote. The results would be shown on a chart on the screen.
- Treadmill Trauma: People will jump on these things running at high speed, try to skateboard on them, or run backwards on them. Never ends well for humans; pets, however, have a 50/50 chance of keeping up.
- Wardrobe Malfunction: Sometimes a person will point out a person's zipper is undone, a person's shirt will get closed in a car door, or yes, a woman's bra will either fall off or accidentally be yanked off exposing her breasts (and up go the censor bars). This show uses jokes like this that no sitcom would dare using, because it is Real Life. In Season 17's double-length episode "No Business in Show Business", an intro to a montage of such sees Bergeron not only use the actual phrase but also reference (without naming names) the incident that named it. "The whole nation was in an uproar so we thought: 'Cool, let's show some wardrobe malfunctions!'"
