One relatively minor but incredibly enjoyable duty of my job at a humor website involves coming up — along with a number of talented co-workers — with amusing descriptions of the Internet’s funnier viral videos. 

But a shockingly high number of those videos revolve around a single theme: poorly performed physical feats. And while nothing brings me more joy than watching arrogant attempts at sports and stunts fail most epically (the notorious “Afro Ninja” draws a guttural laugh from me to this day), there are only so many ways you can describe different gymnasts face-planting into different floors before you begin repeating yourself to at least some extent. 

An occasional method of avoiding descriptive redundancy, one first practiced by my office’s senior staff members (and probably based on some comedic principal of misdirection that I’m sure can be traced back to an ancient Greek dramatist whose name I don’t know), is to endow embarrassing videos with deceptively impressive titles. Thus, a home movie of a painful, 75-foot belly flop is titled “Sick Backflip,” and a young man hurling himself face first into a wall is described as having run up it “flawlessly.”

Of course, belly flops and minor concussions hardly need our editorial assistance to make America laugh. But it’s nice to believe the misleading caption adds at least some extra punch to the audience’s initial viewing experience. (I’m reminded of an article by Amir Blumenfeld praising the equally misleading humor so effectively used on “The Simpsons.”)

With this philosophy in mind, my friend and colleague Kevin recently suggested collecting our site’s more dishonestly described videos in a single group. I now encourage you to visit CollegeHumor’s “Misleading Caption” videos: A brief-but-in-progress listing of “incredible” jumps, “graceful” dives, and a number of other “not hilarious” stunts by “talented” individuals. True, their element of surprise may now be diminished for you, but if you’re anything like me or the slapstick-loving individuals I work with, the humor only increases with the utter wrong-ness of our praise.