Editorial: This punchline isn’t funny

Monday, June 26, 2006 | 7:11 a.m.

A disturbing new trend shows an increasing interest in online viewing of digitally recorded fistfights that one news report has characterized as "America's unfunniest home videos."

According to a recent story by The Washington Post, amateur videographers armed with inexpensive digital or cell phone cameras are recording knockdown, drag-out fights among friends or strangers, then posting them on the Internet.

And few, if any, of these fighters are faking. The bloody noses, bruised jawbones and headlocks are for real. And, given the availability of inexpensive video cameras and of easy-to-use video-sharing Web sites, such fights have become the rage of cyberspace, the Post reports. One of the most popular sites for viewing the recordings, YouTube.com, receives some 40,000 homemade videos a day.

Doesn't anyone have a job or hobbies or homework anymore?

Some, if not many, of these recordings show people exhibiting behavior that not only is dangerous but also is criminal. Fighting in public constitutes a felony in many places.

In Texas last month, the Post reports, police arrested half a dozen men and boys for setting up street fights and selling DVDs of the brawls over the Internet. A 16-year-old girl who participated in one of the fights ended up being hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. In California a seven-minute video that featured two girls fighting was filmed while one of the girls' mothers watched. The girls were suspended from school, the Post reports, and the mother was investigated for child endangerment.

It is a stunningly pitiful commentary on society when a parent is willing to watch her child be pummeled by another child for entertainment.

Those who run video-sharing Web sites told the Post that they are vaguely aware of homemade fight footage, but the employees dedicated to finding and removing objectionable material focus on pornography and sexually oriented material, not violence. A YouTube representative said viewer complaints have resulted in the removal of some fight videos, but such decisions are based on "what the community (of users) feels is appropriate."

It is pathetic that anyone feels such footage is appropriate, let alone entertaining. And it begs to wonder just what kind of a "community" to which some people want to belong.