Vines That Keep Me From Ending It All

I wouldn’t consider myself a YouTuber and I don’t often go on YouTube, but yesterday I was curled up in my bed for my sick day and fell into the trap. I started on Twitter, but decided to reminisce upon the wonderful days of Vine (pre-Tik Tok). There are many Vine compilations on YouTube, and yesterday I picked the one entitled “Vines That Keep Me From Ending It All.” Yes, the title is a little sinister, but it’s a great video.

While I was watching this 14-minute video, there were more than a few times I broke out into uncontrollable laughter. What makes this laughter session different from others, specifically, is that I was alone in my room. I didn’t have anyone to laugh with or at, but I was still literally LOLing. For the rest of this post I’m going to describe a few of my favorite Vines from the video and try to understand why I laugh so hard at them.

My all time favorite Vine is a guy driving a car who passes a “Road Work Ahead” sign and says “Road Work Ahead? Uh, yeah I sure hope it does!” Seeing as TCU has many “Road Work Ahead” signs, I reference this Vine between 1 and 5 times everyday. I would say the humor I find in it mostly has to do with the word play that while the sign means there’s someone working on the road ahead, it’s true that I’d also hope the road itself works. It’s also funny because I’m not sure I’ve ever really driven on a road that didn’t work, seeing as roads aren’t machines that just break. I’m from the Midwest so I’ve driven down my fair share of pothole filled roads, but they’ve still worked.

The second one of my many favorites from this compilation involves a teenage boy who says, “Today my brother pushed me, so I’m starting a Kickstarter to put him down. The benefits of killing him would be that I’d get pushed way less” (while showing a picture of his 2-year-old brother and a graph with an inversely linear relationship regarding getting kicked less). This one is funny for the obvious reasons that 1) you don’t “put down” a person, and 2) graphs are such an arbitrary thing that many people use to prove a point and give any argument an air of legitimacy (although the legitimacy is ironic in this circumstance). I will admit I connected to this boy since there were certain moments of my childhood I would have also liked to put down my sister, so I couldn’t help but laugh at the logos-filled argument the speaker gives.

My last favorite Vine that I’ll explain in this post shows a guy on camera playing the initial notes of the song “Sail” on a keyboard. When the piano player gets to the bass drop portion of the chorus, the person behind the camera slaps the keyboard so hard that the keyboard falls off its stand and the original piano player falls over while yelling “SAIL” very loudly. I find this video funny because I like the song “Sail,” and while the man and keyboard fell over, no one was actually hurt. I like feeling superior to the guy who fell down, but not so superior that it negatively affected his well being.

In conclusion, even though Vines are only 6 seconds maximum, they provide hours of humor. I could watch these short videos for as long as I could watch TV, and they are the very epitome of comedic entertainment.