Adventures in guilty pleasures: The eighth deadly sin

So, I’m pretty sure I’m going to hell. Although I have a lot of reasons to think so, there is one particular guilty pleasure that puts me over the top of alloted violations: hilarious grainy videos of morbidly obese people crashing on dirt bikes.

It doesn’t stop there. I die laughing at videos of nervous soon-to-be-married people fainting at the altar, karate “masters” thwacking themselves in the groin with nunchaks, trampoline stunts gone wrong and sledding mishaps involving the middle-aged. Such delight in the (typically unwarranted) suffering of others just isn’t in line with the whole “love thy neighbor” bit, you know?

Before YouTube, there was only one way to access the raw humiliation of a poorly-executed dance move caught on camera: America’s Funniest Home Videos. And while YouTube is replete with clips of these moments of indignity and has revolutionized the way we interact with media (insert other meaningless and broad statements about our digital age), AFV remains the superior source for schadenfreude humor — asinine Bob Saget/ Tom Bergeron commentary notwithstanding. For reasons I don’t fully understand but completely embrace, the show’s montages of people falling or misjudging the length of slippery diving boards make me laugh until I can’t breathe anymore. Wrong? Yes. Lowbrow? Yup. Hilarious? Undeniably.