Take twenty-six!

I can remember producing TV shows back in college and how we would often put more effort into editing the blooper reel than anything else. The bloopers would usually end up being the longest segment of the whole show. These days every good DVD has a blooper reel in its special features section and people like Dick Clark manage to devote entire hours of prime time TV to nothing but snippets of celebrities screwing up on camera. What is it about bloopers that we find so damn entertaining? Why do we get such a kick out of watching somebody mess up a line, or drop a prop or bust out laughing in the middle of a take?

Personally I think bloopers are yet another byproduct of our voyeuristic mentality these days. It lets us take a glimpse behind the curtain, beyond the façade of all these characters we know and love. Even though logically we know those actors aren’t really like the characters they play on TV, and even though we know the news anchors can’t possibly be that dignified and professional every hour of every day, even though we know all that, our brains still can’t distance themselves from those perfect on-screen personas. Even imperfect TV characters always know exactly what to say at exactly the right moment. When they lose an argument, even in defeat they still have something witty to say. Nobody ever storms off muttering swear words under their breath and coming up with a worthy comeback five minutes too late like we would. These people are too perfect to be real. Which makes sense of course because they’re not real. But bloopers are our only real reminder of that. Bloopers are rare moments when that curtain is pulled back and our brains can finally see these perfect people for what they really are: lame and stupid and, above all, human just like us.

You’ll be watching bloopers on, say, the DVD for Home Improvement and the chick who plays Tim’s wife, Jill, will suddenly realize she said the wrong line. You see her bottom lip tuck under her teeth, hear a brief “Fff…” followed by a bleep and you realize, whoa, Jill just said “fuck”! Jill! You know, Jill? She was always so motherly, so matronly, so almost prudish in her mannerisms. The very idea that she could ever conceivably stoop so low as to say such a four-letter word on ABC of all places, the channel owned by Disney for crying out loud, between the hours of eight o’clock and nine! Why, she never would. But then you see the blooper reel and realize, “No seriously, JILL just said the fucking F-word!” No way. Way!

The funniest bloopers are when some really composed newsman like Walter Cronkite messes up a standup for like the tenth time and in frustration blurts out, “Ah shit.” They bleep the “-it” out of course so all you hear is “Ah sh-” but you know what he said… and it amazes you. Oh my god, Walter Cronkite, the most poised, unruffled man in America, just got mad enough to say the “S-word.” Not only that, he said it over something really stupid. It wasn’t like he was expressing frustration over some particularly dramatic news event like, “Ah shit, President Kennedy was assassinated today,” or, “Ah shit, forest fires ripped through Southern California this week,” or even, “Ah shit, we lost another battalion in Vietnam.” It was, “Ah shit, I can’t seem to say, ‘One smart fellow, he felt smart,’ for my report on J. Edgar Hoover.” How stupid is that? That’s the kind of dumb non-issue that we would say “shit” about. But not Walter Cronkite. It somehow feels good to know that even somebody like that shares those little human moments with us. Perhaps it means we’re not the gigantic losers we think we are. Hell if even Walter freakin’ Cronkite can’t keep it together without letting fly with the cuss words, maybe I’m not such a putz after all.