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).[4][5] 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.[6][7] 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.[8] 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.[9]
Every week, the producers choose three videos to compete 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). The winners of the $100,000 prize in the semifinals then advance to the finals and compete for a vacation prize package (starting in Season 12, and awarded annually starting in Season 15), supplied by DisneyParks, Disney Cruise Line, Adventures by Disney, or Disney Vacation Club, and the title of "America's Funniest Home Video".[6][10] 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".[11]
Show creator Vin Di Bona has produced three spin-off programs: America's Funniest People (1990–1994, with a revival planned for 2025; the pilot aired as an AFV special, episode #3523), World's Funniest Videos (1996), and extension series America's Funniest Home Videos: Animal Edition (2021–2022).[12] 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.[13] 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.[14] 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.[15] 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.
2001–2015: Tom Bergeron
In October 2000, ABC announced that America's Funniest Home Videos would return as a regular weekly series, ordering an eleventh season consisting of 13 episodes.[89] On February 3, 2001,[29] the show returned in its third format, this time with Bergeron (who was also hosting the syndicated Hollywood Squares at the time) serving as host. Episodes were expanded to a full hour (instead of the back-to-back half-hour episodic structure used from 1995 to 1999), and aired on Friday nights at 8:00 p.m. ET; however, it went on hiatus for two months during the 2001-02 season due in part to the September 11 attacks and also because of ABC's decision to fill the Friday lineup with specials and a new, but short-lived lineup of reality and drama series (The Mole II: The Next Betrayal, Thieves and Once and Again, of which Thieves was cancelled after only ten episodes, the first eight of which aired); AFV returned to the schedule (via reruns of the previous season) in December 2001, and began its twelfth season as a midseason replacement in February 2002. A new set (with a studio audience) was introduced—featuring a pillar with several monitors—when Bergeron's first season began.
With ABC moving The Wonderful World of Disney to Saturdays for the 2003-04 season, in September 2003, the show returned to its former Sunday 7:00 p.m. Eastern timeslot, still in its hour-long format (though special episodes occasionally aired on Friday nights until 2007). Unlike Saget, who provided voice-overs to the clips, Bergeron humorously narrated them, though he did lend comedic voiceovers similar to Saget's style to some clips from time to time during the eleventh season. Changes to the set for that season included the replacement of the round video wall by a curved video wall, the pillars being recolored to blue (sometimes other colors), the addition of curved light borders hanging through the set, and lights under the center stage with return of the abbreviated "AFV" logo.
For Season 18 (2007–08), the series began allowing viewers to upload their video submissions online at ABC.com; it would later direct viewers to submit their videos to a new standalone website, AFV.com, beginning with Season 23 (2012–13), in addition to the existing practice of submitting videos via standard mail.[90] In Season 22 (2011–12), AFV released an iOS app on the App Store, allowing Apple mobile device users to record and directly upload videos for submission to the show; a version for Android devices was released the following season.
The final six seasons of Bergeron's run as host fell during two major milestones in the series' history. In 2009, in commemoration of its 20th season, the show started its "Funny Since 1989" campaign and broadcast a special 20th anniversary episode on November 29, featuring a guest appearance by Saget in his return to AFV for the first time since his 1997 departure. Both Saget and Bergeron ended that episode with a pinata party skit and a nod to the Star Wars lightsaber fight scenes during the closing credits (Disney, owner of show co-producer ABC Entertainment and its namesake network, would coincidentally later acquire the franchise through its 2011 purchase of Lucasfilm), with the design of the pinatas resembling the two hosts.
On March 7, 2014, Bergeron announced on his Twitter account that he would step down as host of AFV at the conclusion of its 25th season.[91] The series commemorated its silver anniversary for its 2014–15 season, and broadcast a 25th Anniversary Celebrity Celebration special on February 15, 2015, in which Bergeron and ABC sitcom stars Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis Ross (both co-leads of Black-ish) and Cristela Alonzo (of Cristela) recounted memorable videos from the show's history, with one of three nominees from the pool being awarded a Disney Cruise Line vacation grand prize. Bergeron's penultimate episode (the last episode he hosted from the show's soundstage and the final (and season 25's second) $100,000 show of his tenure) aired on May 10, 2015, incorporating periodic montages of funny home videos that defined the show's then-25-year run. His final episode as host, which was also the 25th season finale, aired the following week on May 17; taped on-location at Disneyland for that season's edition of the annual "Grand Prize Spectacular" (which utilized various formats since 2005, and featured one of the two (formerly three) $100,000 winners from the current season winning a Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, or in earlier seasons, an Adventures by Disney vacation package), AFV's 25th anniversary and the Disneyland Resort's 60th Anniversary Diamond Celebration (which began on May 22, 2015) featured an auto-tuned montage of clips and outtakes from Bergeron's run as host and closed with him being escorted after walking off the outdoor stage near Sleeping Beauty Castle following the grand prize presentation on a golf cart driven by Saget in a special cameo appearance. (Bergeron's 15-year run is the longest hosting tenure for the series to date.)
Bergeron would later make an in-studio guest appearance alongside his successor, Alfonso Ribeiro, in the Season 26 "Grand Prize Spectacular" finale (aired on May 22, 2016), in which he played the show's final audience participation game segment ("Who Breaks It?") and won an Ribiero AFV pillow and socks. He was featured alongside fellow hosts Ribeiro, Saget and Fuentes in the 2019 special AFV: America...This Is You!.[92][93]
2015–present: Alfonso Ribeiro
On May 19, 2015, two days after Bergeron's final episode aired, ABC announced that Alfonso Ribeiro (known for his role as Carlton Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) would take over as host of America's Funniest Home Videos starting with its 26th season (premiering on October 11 of that year). Bergeron formally introduced Ribeiro's new role as host during the latter's guest performance on the 20th season finale of Dancing with the Stars. (Ribeiro competed during and won the previous season; coincidentally, as Bergeron had done from the dance competition series' 2005 debut until his 2015 departure from AFV, Ribeiro would later begin co-hosting DWTS, in addition to his existing AFV duties, in 2022.)[94][92][95] Prior to becoming host, Ribeiro appeared on the show's March 8, 2015 episode playing an audience participation game (called "Who's Makin' That Racket?") alongside then-host Bergeron.
Ribeiro continued Bergeron's concept of humorously narrating clips, sometimes making extensive use of rhymes in his voiceovers. While some of the Bergeron-era clip segments, the in-studio audience and background parts of the Bergeron-era set props remained intact and/or continued into the first five years of Ribeiro's hosting tenure, the stage was updated to feature a metal floor layout and stairway connected to a puzzle-style cube screen composed of smaller sized flat-panel TV screens, while new segments (developed especially for Ribiero's run) were incorporated into the show. Audience participation games introduced during the Bergeron era were eliminated for the 27th season (2016–17). Additional set props such as arrow-styled flat-panel monitors and lit color-changing tables (where selected audience members not assigned to the bleacher areas sit) were added to the AFV set in 2019.
For its 28th season (premiering on October 8, 2017), AFV was displaced from its longtime 7:00 p.m. ET slot to make room for the reality competition series The Toy Box (which was in its second and final season), resulting in the former being moved to 8:00 p.m. ET. Periodically over the course of three months (between November 26, 2017 and February 4, 2018), the show employed a "repeat/new" episode scheduling format similar to that employed during the later Saget and Fugelsang/Fuentes eras, with new episodes in the 7:00 p.m. hour (occasionally reduced to a single hour block due to holiday movie presentations and specials airing in 8:00 p.m. slot during the holiday season), before permanently returning to the earlier slot on February 11, 2018. On October 29, 2018, ABC renewed AFV for two more seasons, extending the series for its 30th and 31st seasons (premiering on September 29, 2019 and October 18, 2020, respectively). On December 8, 2019 (following a new episode in its regular slot), ABC broadcast AFV: America, This is You!, a retrospective documentary commemorating AFV's 30th anniversary; the special featured appearances by creator/executive producer Vin di Bona and four of the five hosts—Ribeiro, Saget (in his final AFV appearance before his death in January 2022), Fuentes and Bergeron—and chronicled the show's development and pop culture status.[96]
Production was suspended before the completion of the 30th season due to the COVID-19 pandemic; in lieu of its standard "grand prize" season finale format, a quarantine themed special, AFV@Home, aired on May 17, 2020; similar in concept to CBS's AFV-styled The Greatest AtHome Videos (which aired its initial special two days prior) and incorporating hosted segments recorded at Ribeiro's Los Angeles home, the special featured humorous videos submitted to the program and culled from various social media platforms that were filmed mainly during stay-at-home isolation.[97][98][99] The series returned to the studio for its 31st season (which premiered on October 18, 2020), however, studio segments utilized a virtual audience—a concept first used for the last three episodes of season 30 prior to the in-studio production shutdown—to comply with federal social distancing guidelines, consisting of audience members appearing and interviews with the grand prize nominees being conducted via videotelephony on the various set monitors.[100][101] On June 11, 2021, the fourth offshoot of the franchise, America's Funniest Home Videos: Animal Edition, premiered on Nat Geo Wild (which ABC acquired through its 2019 purchase of most of 21st Century Fox's assets).
On January 9, 2022, during the 32nd season (which premiered on October 3, 2021),[102][103] original host Bob Saget was found dead in his room at a Ritz Carlton hotel near Williamsburg, Florida, a day after his stand-up comedy performance in nearby Orlando. (Saget's death was announced during an ABC News special report that interrupted the end of a new episode airing that night.) The show paid tribute to him in the January 16, 2022 episode, which opened with a dedication to Saget by Alfonso Ribeiro, clips of Saget's tenure as host, and a brief discussion between him and Bergeron from the 2009 20th anniversary special, along with a standard pre-credits dedication;[104] a tribute segment featuring clips from the Saget era was featured in subsequent episodes for the remainder of Season 32. After two years of using a virtual audience, the 33rd season (which debuted on October 2, 2022) returned to using an in-person studio audience, although nominees for the weekly grand prize contest would continue to appear via remote; the cash amounts for the videos selected for the weekly prize contest were also increased for the first time since AFV's series debut, doubling the first place prize to $20,000 (from $10,000), second place to $6,000 (from $3,000), and third place to $4,000 (from $2,000).[105] For Season 34, in addition to standard hour-long episodes in the show's regular timeslot, ABC aired edited half-hour versions of AFV episodes from the previous season on selected Sundays during the early fall to fill airtime following Wonderful World of Disney film presentations scheduled to end prior to the conclusion of the network's Sunday lineup. (Although Ribeiro is a SAG-AFTRA member—being exempted from the strike under the separate Network Television Code contract—and co-executive producer/head writer Mike Palleschi and co-writer Erik Lohla are WGA members, the series was not affected by the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes, the latter having ended four days before Season 34's October 1, 2023 premiere.)