Screenshot: KY3
What’s the funniest moment of live TV you’ve ever seen? That was the question tweeted by a user on X less than a week ago. And it’s produced some of the most hilarious examples of weird broadcasting history that you can imagine.
There’s that time a poor TV host tried to stomp grapes to make wine, the time two old-school news reporters started talking tough, and way too many awkward segues to mention. There are, of course, enough sexual innuendos and word flubs to fill a book.
At the dawn of American TV broadcasting in the 1940s, all TV was live. That’s one of the reasons so few of the earliest shows survive. If you wanted to preserve a live broadcast, you’d have to literally film a TV monitor using a technology called the kinescope.
Obviously, we’ve come quite a long way since the 1940s but it’s kind of amusing that so many of the clips being shared today work in much the same way. They’re recorded on our phones directly from TV screens before they finally go viral by getting passed around on social media sites like Facebook, X, and Instagram.
Today we’ve got some of the funniest examples being shared thanks to that genius prompt. Do you have a favorite live TV moment you don’t see on your list? What truly classic moment did we miss? Let us know in the comments.