What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?

This is one of my all-time favorite questions; it is usually asked by everyone except the one person who didn’t see the proverbial train coming.  It is what made America’s Funniest Home Videos so popular, not to mention YouTube:  average – and even above-average – people doing obviously stupid things.

Like the guy on his cell phone who walks over an open manhole cover and falls into a sewer… or the fat lady who can’t see the sidewalk in front of her and steps on the banana peel, falling onto her well-padded behind… or the guy telling his associate what an idiot his boss is while his boss is standing right behind him.  Classic stuff.  And let’s be honest, more often than not it is pretty darn funny – and could earn you $100,000 in prizes (ask Tom Bergeron)!

But do you know what isn’t funny, yet is totally predictable?  People like Gordon Gee and Roy Hibbert and that California kid who licked the Taco Bell taco shells.

Overpaid administrators, overconfident athletes and underpaid, semi-moronic, post-pubescent fast food workers.

Maybe we’ve changed as a society or maybe the prevalence of traditional, digital and social media is simply forcing all of us to see what’s always been there.  But while TV shows like ABC’s What Would You Do? with John Quinones gives us hope that not everyone is a disgusting idiot, there are also shows like World’s Dumbest and Tosh.o and Ridiculousness that would indicate there is no hope at all.

We’ve got politicians tweeting their wieners, restaurant workers urinating into coffee carafes, bankers embezzling their customers’ money, skateboarders jumping off rooftops, drunken college students falling off balconies, Bayou boys catching live gators, ax men dropping trees on each other and housewives of New York and Atlanta and 10 other metro markets making total asses of themselves.  It is seemingly endless.

And to make matters even worse, when it all goes bad – as it inevitably does – these knuckleheads seem surprised and even indignant (reference Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia).  As for Gordon Gee (who got retired) and Roy Hibbert (who got dusted) and the Taco Bell licker (who is being investigated), they have yet to respond to being caught in the act of stupidity, but they most certainly will.  It’s just a matter of time.