A child who gets a piece of cake in his face, a tiny dog buried under snow, a man who falls through the floor: home videos have had a permanent place on Dutch television for years. Hundreds of thousands of people still watch it every week. What makes other people’s (physical) suffering so much fun? And haven’t short films on TikTok, for example, caught up with these shows?
“People like to see others fall,” Ron Boszhard tells NU.nl. From 2000 he presented the home video program for four years The Cutest Home. “That something completely unexpected happens. The strength is also in the length: the films are only short, often no more than fifteen seconds. That is addictive, you keep watching.”
Home videos have had a place on TV since the early 1990s. It all started in Japan. A popular Tokyo studio program aired a few viewer-generated clips each episode. The best one was rewarded with a prize.
The American program maker Vin Di Bona saw a show in it. And so it came about America’s Funniest Home Video’s, with Full Houseactor Bob Saget (pictured above) as presenter. The program still exists. “In the beginning, people still had to send VHS tapes through the mail,” said Saget, who died in 2022, in a interview. “And now you can do it through the app,” says Alfonso Ribeiro, who has been presenting it since 2015.
“You laugh at someone else’s expense”
After the success of the American program, a Dutch version with home videos was soon launched in the early 1990s: The Cutest Home. Linda de Mol was first the face of the program, in 2000 Boszhard took over from her.
It quickly became a hit: more than one and a half million people watched it every week. The program brought a mix of purchased films from America and videos submitted by Dutch viewers. It stopped in 2004 because the NPO no longer thought it belonged on the public broadcaster.
SBS came up with its own home video program around that time. The commercial channel has been broadcasting since 2002 Laugh At Home Videos out, currently presented by Airen Mylene. The 1.7 million viewers are no longer reached, but more than half a million people tune in to the show every week.
In the videos, sometimes quite painful situations pass by. Why then does that make you laugh? “There is a theory that we laugh because we feel better than others,” says humor scientist Dick Zijp. “You laugh at someone else’s expense. And you could relate that to home videos. If someone slips on a banana peel, you subconsciously think: oh, that didn’t happen to me.”
0:24‘Children cannot be directed’
The context around home videos automatically makes the images funnier. You see a person or animal in a seemingly normal situation, but because it is a home video you know: this is going wrong.
Think of a scene where a man tries to cross a mud puddle. You already know in the first second: it is going to slip or fall in the mud bath. “Home videos can be compared to slapstick: someone starts with something, stubbornly continues and still makes a mistake.”
Although home video programs had their heyday in the 1990s, the videos are still alive and well thanks to social media such as TikTok. “I think there are more home movies than ever,” thinks Boszhard. “Thanks to our phone, we can film everything.”
Do the TV programs still have a right to exist? Zijp thinks so. “In any case, I always hang around when I zap past it. And before you know it, you’re another fifteen minutes away.”
Boszhard is still a fan of home videos. “It’s flat humor, and I like that.” On Instagram he still shares plenty of videos every day with falls, blunders or other crazy scenes. “I like to let people start the day with a smile,” he says.
Not everything gets on his feed. “For example, something bad with children, or people who are in severe pain. I like films in which the suffering is not too bad. I like videos with children the best: you know that they are spontaneous. Because children cannot be directed .”
