VIDEO: Awkwardly Hilarious News Bloopers

We usually watch the news to get the latest info on world events and we expect reporters to do just that – report.

But once in a while, they mess up. They’re only human after all.

News can be funny, too!

Just click on the video below to see the most awkwardly hilarious news bloopers!

According to Wikipedia, the term “blooper” was popularized in America by television producer Kermit Schaefer in the 1950s; the terms “boner” (meaning a boneheaded mistake) and “breakdown” had been in common usage previously.

Schaefer produced a long-running series of Pardon My Blooper! record albums in the 1950s and 1960s which featured a mixture of actual recordings of errors from television and radio broadcasts and re-creations. Schaefer also transcribed many reported bloopers into a series of books that he published up until his death in 1979.

Schaefer was by no means the first to undertake serious study and collection of broadcast errata; NBC’s short-lived “behind-the-scenes” series Behind The Mike (1940–41) occasionally featured reconstructions of announcers’ gaffes and flubs as part of the “Oddities in Radio” segment, and movie studios had been producing so-called “gag reels” of outtakes since the 1930s.

The term “blooper” originates from wartime censorship, and is short for “Blue Pencil” – which was used to cross out unacceptable parts of documents and letters by the “blue-person”. Jonathan Hewat was the first person in the UK to broadcast radio bloopers, on a Bank Holiday Show on BBC Radio Bristol at the end of the 1980s.

He subsequently produced and presented a half-hour show on that station called So You Want to Run a Radio Station?. This was nominated for a Sony Award. The transmission of humorous mistakes, previously considered private material only for the ears of industry insiders, came to the attention of BBC Radio 2.

They commissioned a series of six fifteen-minute programmes called Can I Take That Again?, with Jonathan James Moore (then Head of BBC Light Entertainment, Radio) somewhat nervously producing the series. The success of this series led to a further five series on Radio 2, as well as a small number of programmes (called “Bloopers”) on BBC Radio 4.

Currently, Jonathan Hewat, who has a personal collection of 3,000 clips from over four decades of worldwide English-speaking broadcasting, feels that with clanger slots,especially on TV, being taken over by Denis Norden and then by Terry Wogan and several others, they are no longer sufficiently unusual to warrant transmitting as complete programmes.

As often happens, radio bloopers – involving the subtleties of language – are usually considerably funnier than the visual (TV) ones which so often involve endless clips of people falling over.

Some of the earliest clips in the Hewat collection go back to Rudy Vallee “corpsing” (giggling uncontrollably) during a recording of “There Is a Tavern in the Town” in one of the very earliest OBs (Outside Broadcasts) of the Illumination of the Fleet.

Bloopers are usually accidental and humorous. Where actors need to memorize large numbers of lines or perform a series of actions in quick succession, mistakes can be expected.