The kid on the screen can’t be more than 2. He’s standing on a patch of lawn, examining a few dark mounds that some animal has dropped on the grass. As he leans in for a closer look, he begins to lose his balance. The image freezes, and Tom Bergeron, the puckish host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, puts his finger on the TV monitor. “I see a forehead-to-shit ratio right there,” Bergeron says, tracing the kid’s likely downward trajectory.

It’s a late fall afternoon and we’re on the show’s cold and spangled Los Angeles set, a glowing cavern filled with lava-colored video walls and spectral white stars. Bergeron, dressed in a black suit, is rehearsing a bit called “Hit, Miss, or Disgusting?” in which two audience members will be asked to predict the clip’s outcome: Will the kid fall headfirst into the minefield? Or will he swerve away at the last second?

Since this is America’s Funniest Home Videos—a show that for more than 20 years has served as a highlight reel of our lowest moments—the answer is pretty obvious. You don’t get on national TV by dodging poop, and sure enough, when the video resumes, the kid goes down, right on target. “That’s the first face-plant into feces we’ve ever had,” Bergeron says with mock pride. He takes a sip of coffee before moving on to the next clip, in which a little girl gets clocked by a tire swing.

In less than an hour, 200 audience members will arrive at the studio, dressed neatly but not too stuffily, like congregants at an easygoing megachurch. And from the moment they sit down, they will laugh—deep laughs, the kind that make shoulders pump like pistons. They’ll laugh at a baby with its thumb stuck in a toilet lid, a bowler with his thumb stuck in a ball, and a dog with its tongue stuck in a guy’s nose.

Unless you happen to spend a lot of time around little kids or the elderly, it has probably been years since you’ve seen America’s Funniest Home Videos (or AFV, as it has now become known). This is understandable, given that technically speaking it’s the uncoolest show on TV, a saccharine medley of “did I do that?” moppets, frazzled pets, and homegroan puns, all strung together by a lite-ska musical theme. Even by network TV standards, AFV is radically square.

But as dorky as it is, AFV may be one of the most subtly influential shows of the past two decades. Need proof? Just check your Facebook feed. Chances are pretty good that in the past few weeks somebody posted a video that was short, serendipitous, and brazenly stupid—a cocky skateboarder wiping out on a rail, perhaps, or a cat facing down a metronome. Millions of such quick-blip distractions now rove the web, and for that we have AFV to thank and/or blame.

The tens of thousands of clips in AFV’s video vault are broken down into 12 categories of humor, from adults and animals to fall-downs and weddings. Many of these clips have never been seen by the public—giving the show its secret weapon against the web.

When the show debuted in 1989, in the midst of the camcorder boom, it introduced a whole new accidental-auteur style, marked by wobbly camerawork and abrupt denouements. Because AFV consisted entirely of audience submissions—making the show an early adopter of crowdsourced humor—it instilled the then-revelatory notion that anyone’s follies could be a hit TV gag. The fat guy falling into a pool, the dude wiping out after a botched karate-chop—those could have been your neighbors. Over time a formula emerged: a few seconds of setup, a moment of physical calamity (usually accidental), and a quick shot that showed everything was fine and no one got hurt.

Now AFV’s DNA can be found everywhere: the “Forever” wedding, “Charlie Bit My Finger,” the 3.8 million cat videos on YouTube—all build on the goofy physicality and to-the-point punch line timing established by AFV. In fact, watching an episode of AFV now feels a lot like watching the web.

For those who can be open-minded about its brainlessness, AFV is still consistently, almost soothingly, hilarious. It’s wall-to-wall primal comedy, from trampoline falls to groin-kicks to old people getting hit by kites. And while the show’s format has undergone a few tweaks over the years, its fundamental MO remains largely unchanged: Each week, a slew of carefully vetted clips are edited together as zippily as possible, with a cash prize—now as high as $100,000—going to the audience favorite. This is probably why, even though it long ago disappeared from pop-culture radar, AFV remains wildly successful. The show is about to wrap its 21st season—more than ER or Law & Order and only one behind The Simpsons, that other ever-durable chronicle of hapless suburbia. It averages more than 7 million viewers a week and celebs from Tina Fey to Muhammad Ali have approached Bergeron to profess their fandom. And because the show is relatively cheap to produce, ABC will likely keep it on the air until the Rapture—unless, of course, somebody gets filmed knocking their head on a stoplight on the way up, requiring a post-event special. “In my house,” Bergeron says, “we call this show ‘the annuity.’”

But here’s the irony: The AFV format has proved so enduring, it has spawned a slew of aggressive competitors. There are now sites like FAIL Blog and the Daily What, as well as TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Tosh.0,scouring the web for hits. And many of them can get videos on the air much quicker than the once-a-week AFV can. When that happens, it’s the showbiz equivalent of a football to the crotch. “I stomp my foot when I see a funny video that’s not mine,” says Vin Di Bona, the show’s creator, who still serves as director and executive producer.

But Di Bona has a secret weapon: an archive of tens of thousands of videos, many of which have never been seen by the public. He’ll need them, too. Because after having the stupid-video landscape almost to itself for years, America’s Funniest Home Videos now must compete with … America’s Funniest Home Videos.

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