America's Funniest Home Videos, also called America's Funniest Videos (AFV), is an American video clip television series on ABC, based on a recurring segment on the Japanese variety show Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan (1986–1992). The show features humorous home videos that are submitted by viewers. The most common videos feature unintentional physical comedy, pets or children and some staged pranks.
Originally airing as a special in 1989, it debuted as a regular weekly series in January 1990. The show was originally hosted by comedian Bob Saget for the 1989 special and the first eight seasons of the series incarnation. After Saget stepped down as host in 1997, John Fugelsang and Daisy Fuentes took over as co-hosts for its ninth and tenth seasons. After two years of being shown as occasional specials (hosted by various actors and comedians such as D. L. Hughley, Richard Kind, Stuart Scott and Steve Carell, with Mike Kasem and Kerri Kasem hosting international versions), ABC brought the series back on Friday nights in 2001 with Tom Bergeron taking over hosting duties; Bergeron is the longest-running host in the show's history to date, staying on AFV for fifteen seasons until he stepped down in 2015. Alfonso Ribeiro has hosted the program since 2015.
Premise America's Funniest Home Videos is based on the 1986–1992 Tokyo Broadcasting System variety program Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV (also known as Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan), which featured a segment in which viewers were invited to send in video clips from their home movies; ABC, which holds a 50% ownership share in the program, pays a royalty fee to TBS Holdings, Inc. for the use of the format (although the original parent show is no longer in production). Contestants can submit their videos by uploading them on the show's official website, AFV.com; through its iOS or Android apps; on the show's official Facebook fan page; or by sending them via mail to a Hollywood, California post-office box address. The majority of the video clips are short (5–30 seconds) and organized according to topics mentioned in the host's monologues. Videos usually feature people and animals getting into humorous accidents or behaving amusingly on camera, while others include clever marriage proposals, people and animals displaying interesting talents (such as pets that sound like they speak certain words or phrases, or toddlers with the ability to name all past U.S. presidents), and practical jokes. As of 1989, the show's production process featured a group of screeners viewing the submitted tapes and grading them on a 1–10 scale based on how humorous they were. The videos graded the highest were sent to the show's producers, and then to Di Bona and another producer for final approval. Videos that feature staged accidents, people being seriously injured, the abuse of animals and children, or that otherwise do not meet ABC network standards and practices are generally not accepted for broadcast.
Every week, the producers choose three videos to compete in the qualifiers for a prize, with the studio audience voting for the winner. The first-place winner is awarded a $20,000 cash prize (previously $10,000 until Season 32), advancing to the season's semifinals and placed in the running for the $100,000 prize awarded during the middle and near the end of each season (each with its own corresponding eligibility period for the $10,000 winners selected from the block of episodes preceding each $100,000 prize telecast); the runner-up receives $6,000 (previously $3,000) and the third-place video receives $4,000 (previously $2,000). Starting in Season 12 (and awarded annually starting in Season 15), the winners of the $100,000 prize in the semifinals then advance to the grand finals and compete for a vacation prize package supplied by Disney Experiences (through its Disney Parks, Disney Cruise Line, Adventures by Disney or Disney Vacation Club arms), and the title of "America's Funniest Home Video". The program's studio segments are taped in front of a studio audience (although the specials that aired in 1999 and 2000 only featured pre-recorded audience responses, and episodes taped towards the end of Season 30 through Season 32 featured a "virtual" audience presented on set monitors through video conferencing due to local and state crowd restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic). Audience members are asked to dress in "business casual or nicer".
Show creator Vin Di Bona has produced three spin-off programs: America's Funniest People (1990–1994, with a revival planned for 2025; the revival's pilot aired on June 15 of that year as an AFV special), World's Funniest Videos (1996), and extension series America's Funniest Home Videos: Animal Edition (2021–2022). In 2019, Di Bona also created an attempt at an adult-oriented spinoff, Videos After Dark, which was not picked up as a series but aired on ABC as a two-episode special. Di Bona also created Show Me the Funny (1998–1999, Fox Family Channel) and That's Funny (2004–2006, syndication), two similar comedic home video series—both hosted by actor/comedian Rondell Sheridan, who succeeded original host Stephanie Miller on the former—that largely relied on repackaged clips from the video libraries of AFV and America's Funniest People. Several local television stations, even those not affiliated with ABC, also developed special funny home video segments in their newscasts during the early 1990s, and or local spinoffs, inspired by the series. As noted in the closing credits of each episode, most of the videos have been edited for length due to time constraints. In addition, according to the contest plugs, family members (both immediate or relatives) of employees of Vin Di Bona Productions, ABC, Inc., its corporate parent The Walt Disney Company (and for the substantial majority of Saget's hosting tenure, its legal predecessor, Capital Cities/ABC) and their related subsidiaries are ineligible for the show's contests and prizes.
Series overview
History Development Series creator Vin Di Bona had previously developed a similar concept to AFV in Animal Crack-Ups (1987–1990), a celebrity game show that aired primarily as part of ABC's Saturday morning lineup and was based on the Japanese series Wakuwaku Dōbutsu Land (or "Waku Waku Animal World"), a game in which contestants answered questions related to funny video clips involving animals (accompanied by narration that anthropomorphized the clips' subjects). Di Bona—who decided to form his eponymous production company following his stint as a line producer on the first season (1985–1986) of the ABC action-adventure series MacGyver—partnered with former CBS News executive Joe Bellon, whose distribution company, Bellon Enterprises (founded after Bellon left CBS in 1985), at the time had been struggling in its efforts to sell the international rights to programming concepts—like Wakuwaku—based on shows originally aired by the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS). The two soon developed a pitch for an American version of Wakuwaku, using the licensed animal footage from the program, eventually selling it to ABC.
In the spring of 1989, while Di Bona and his then-wife, Gina, attended the Monte-Carlo Television Festival, the latter passed a booth for a distributor showcasing a segment from the TBS variety program Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV (or Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan), in which hosts Ken Shimura and Cha Kato presented and provided comedic narration over a package of funny caught-on-tape moments sent in by viewers; at the end of each show, audience members voted for their favorite clip among those featured. At Gina's insistence, Di Bona contacted TBS about licensing the rights to the concept.
Di Bona, with Bellon's assistance in acquiring the clips from TBS, put together a presentation reel featuring footage from the Gokigen TV home video segment; ABC executives, immediately after seeing the reel (Di Bona has claimed in interviews that the network decided to buy the proposed show four minutes into the pitch), decided to place an order for the concept that would become America's Funniest Home Videos. However, the network intended for it to be a one-off special, unsure that a program showing other people's home movies would work as a weekly series. Di Bona enlisted most of the staff from Animal Crack-Ups—including among others, writer Todd Thicke (whose older brother, actor/host/songwriter Alan Thicke, hosted Crack-Ups in addition to his starring role in the ABC sitcom Growing Pains), producer Steve Paskay, creative consultant Gina Di Bona, coordinating producers Joe and (his son and business partner) Greg Bellon, and director Ron de Moraes—to work on the pilot special. Di Bona also borrowed the comedic narration style used in Gokigen TV and Wakuwaku, having the host provide voices to both humans and animals featured in the clips as well as exaggerated observational humor.
In the run-up to the special's broadcast, during the fall of 1989, Vin Di Bona Productions took out ads in national magazines (such as TV Guide and People) asking people to send in their home videos featuring funny or amazing moments. Around 1,800 tapes were submitted for inclusion in the pilot special.
John Ritter was Vin Di Bona's first choice to host the program, but was unavailable (according to Di Bona, Ritter did not envision the hosting role as fitting in with his shifting career focus from sitcoms to feature films). Los Angeles sports reporter Fred Roggin was also approached to host, but due to his contract negotiations with NBC (and its O&O station KNBC), he was unable to accept. (Roggin would eventually host a similar show of his own, Roggin's Heroes, which aired in syndication from 1991 to 1993.) Di Bona then approached actor/comedian Bob Saget (then starring as Danny Tanner in the ABC sitcom Full House), whom he remembered from the latter's May 1989 guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, impressed by his comedic timing and storytelling during the interview; however, Di Bona was unaware of Saget's existing ABC series role until he was informed by network executives when pitching Saget as host. Saget was initially reluctant to accept, but Di Bona ultimately convinced him to agree to do the gig, believing that it would showcase Saget's general comedic talent, and make him known for that than merely for his role as the cleanliness-obsessed "dorky dad" on Full House.
1989–1997: Bob Saget
The show debuted on November 26, 1989, as an hour-long special, produced by Di Bona and Steve Paskay, with Saget as host. Actress Kellie Martin, then the star of fellow ABC series Life Goes On (as Becca Thatcher), which would serve as the lead-in program to AFHV for the latter show's first four seasons, and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (as the voice of Daphne Blake), served as a special guest and assisted Saget in hosting two segments during the special, including the announcement of the three grand prize finalists (for the special, the first-place winner was awarded a $5,000 cash prize, while the second and third-place winners each won an RCA camcorder). Married couple Helen and Bill Wholf of Thompson, Ohio were awarded the show's first grand prize for a clip titled "The Dishwasher Lady", in which Bill discovers Helen had gotten herself stuck inside their dishwasher after her hair became entangled in the machine's spray arm while attempting to retrieve a dropped utensil. The clip, the Panasonic OmniMovie HQ 1FX8-CCD camcorder that Bill Wholf used to record the video, and other artifacts from the series—including an annotated pilot script, an audience voting machine, and a presentation reel created to pitch the proposed special to ABC executives—were donated to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in 2008.