Infomercial Fails

About

Infomercial Fails refer to montage videos or animated GIFs of actors struggling to perform basic tasks, which are often over-exaggerated in a humorous, unbelievable manner.

Origin

Infomercials^[1], sometimes referred to as Direct Response TV (DRTV), are long commercials for household items that also contain a phone number, mailing address or website through which people can purchase the advertised product. The word itself was coined in the 1980s by entertainment mogul Paul Ruffino who was known for purchasing program-length blocks of commercial time and, in 1982, the first infomercial aired, selling a line of hair growth products. The first online montage dedicated to pointing out the over-the-top struggles of informercial actors was created by Everything Is Terrible^[9] and uploaded to Funny or Die on September 3rd, 2009 (shown below).

Spread

A second compilation was uploaded YouTube on April 18th, 2010 by Derek Lieu. Titled "As Seen on TV – a tribute to doing it wrong" (shown below), the video featured clips of actors struggling to complete household chores set to the Beatles song "Help!". As of February 2013, this video has gained more than 2 million views.

The same month, the food blog Serious Eats^[10] highlighted both compilations. In 2011, infomercial compilations appeared on Pleated Jeans^[11], Neatorama^[12] and I Waste So Much Time.^[13] In January of 2012, a single topic blog titled "Infomercial Problems"^[14] launched, which featured videos of the strange behavior exhibited in these commercials. In August of that year, the Huffington Post^[15] highlighted additional informercial fails. The same month, a photo album of 141 infomercial GIFs was created on Imgur.^[2] Two days later, a thread appeared on 4chan's /wsg/^[3] board (Work-Safe GIF), asking users to post additional infomercial GIFs.

On September 26th, 2012, compilations of informercial fail GIFs were featured on Uproxx^[7] and Buzzfeed.^[16]. On October 21st, a GIF featuring a family overreacting to a mother spilling soda (shown below) was submitted to the /r/funny^[4] subreddit, which managed to gain over 4,700 upvotes and over 600 comments. A day later, the subreddit /r/wheredidthesodago^[5] was launched, dedicated to animated GIFs of out-of-context or absurd moments from infomercials. Within three months, the subreddit accumulated upwards of 125,000 subscribers.^[6] In December 2012, another collection of GIFs was shared on /r/Funny^[17], gaining more than 4,400 upvotes and 1,600 points overall. Additionally, as of February 2013, there are more than 1,700 search results for the keywords "bad infomercial" on YouTube.^[8]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References