10 Brilliant Comedy Gems Hiding on YouTube

10 Steve Carell and Spastic Animals

There is no goddamn reason in the world that video should make me laugh, but I will lose it every single time I watch it. Which is to say about 75 times since it was first posted back in 2008. It took five years for that thing to reach a million views, and that kind of makes me sad. If you're one of those people who has to be prompted to turn your sound on when you watch a video, you're definitely in the wrong article, but I'll give you a heads up with this one, because it's not just an insane dog spaz-barking at the camera. They've dropped out the sound and replaced it with Steve Carell's nut-busting freak-out scene from Bruce Almighty. It's so stupid and simple, but holy shit, does it work.

Now, normally, I hate the idea of someone taking another person's original joke and just reproducing it over another video, because to me that just boils down to "Look, I can do that, too!" But I'm making an exception for this one, because someone found a cow speed-licking the air and turned it into comedy gold. My only complaint is that this one isn't six hours long:

9 Man Loves the Shit Out of Riding a Camel

Explain to me how the world is a fair and just place when this video, uploaded in 2005, sits at only 1,200 views. No, there wasn't any creativity involved, but goddammit, tell me how a person can watch that video of that guy laughing that hard while riding that camel and not immediately show it to everyone they know and love. Because when I first saw this thing, I was in one of the worst moods of my life. My back was hurting, I was pushing through the day on two hours of sleep, I was hungry, and the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and try to write comedy. Then I watched that guy, and 23 seconds later, the world was fine again.

Just listen to him totally lose it when that camel stands up and takes off. The way his camera just jets around in all directions, combined with his uncontrollable joy, make it impossible for him to keep focused. I could sincerely watch a 20-minute video of that. And if he is that jovial in everyday life, I would give a lot to take him to an amusement park for a day. Just hanging out and soaking up as much of that as my brain could handle before I burst into a cloud of confetti and candy like a pinata made out of happy.

8 How to Do Pretty Much Anything

I'm cheating just a tad with this one, because it already has 1.7 million views. However, I'm not just directing attention to this specific video. Yes, it's funny in its own right -- a guy showing you how to make a "delicious chocolate milkshake" by speed-chucking ingredients all over his counter in total silence. Then violently smashing an egg into the mixture at the end. But consider the milkshake video sort of a primer that prepares you for the rest of his stuff. Like "How to Play the Keyboard":

Or pretty much anything on the entire channel.

Of course, I couldn't mention how-to videos without bringing up one of my all-time favorites: "How to Make Any Spring Airsoft Gun Semi-Auto." Make sure you stick around for the ending.

7 The Chewbacca Vacuum

I'd love to give credit to the original owner of the video, but it's long since been removed. I'm assuming it's because his or her vacuum became sentient, ate everyone in the house, and then deleted the video in hopes of covering its birth into our realm. As the title suggests, when the owner turns off the vacuum, it makes a noise eerily close to Chewbacca's famous growling. But what makes me laugh the most is that every time they demonstrate this, they flash a photo of Chewy. And every time they do a new one, I laugh harder and harder. I'm convinced that if they had made this a five-minute video, I'd be in the hospital right now.

6 Trolling a Parade With a Trumpet

I've seen some trolling in my time, but none that comes close to what this guy did when he grabbed his video camera, his trumpet, and his enormous set of balls. Because he wasn't doing his trolling in the anonymous recesses of the Net. No, he brought his out into the real world. At a parade. During a fucking military procession.

He waited until the band was passing by and leading up to another song, and then before they could get the first note out, he began blasting the most horrible trumpet any of them were likely to have ever heard. The kind of trumpet you expect to hear at a fourth grade recital. This guy's look says more than I ever could:

That's the look of a man who's thinking, "One more note, and I swear to you that the next time you take a shit, it'll sound like a mariachi band is trying to escape your asshole." Oh, speaking of bad music ...

5 85-Year-Old Organ Player Puts His Mark on a Wedding

What the hell is it about bad instrument playing that makes me laugh so hard? It isn't just me, is it? Surely there are other people out there who lose it when they hear something like this 85-year-old man just absolutely mangling the end of a wedding. Because as of right now, only 45,000 people have seen that, and I feel like this is one of those things that's right up the Internet's alley. Not just because of the bad organ player, but because it takes place during the most serious, sacred occasion, and that is the perfect recipe for comedy.

Rebecca Black didn't get famous because she made a bad song. She got famous for singing a bad song in that saccharine sweet, innocent setting while making a serious, legitimate attempt to do something that she thought was great. It's the same with that organ player. Listen to him trying so hard to get it right. That four-second pause that starts around 38 seconds in is one of the funniest things I've ever heard, because you can just picture him trying to get his hands in the right spot. I like to imagine him with his tongue slightly poking out of the corner of his mouth, like a little kid learning it for the first time. How those people walked out of that church without completely losing it is beyond me. They have hearts of pure obsidian.

4 X-Men Insanity

I'll be the first to admit that I'm extremely hard on entertainment -- especially comedy. I don't mean to be. I've just been around the block enough times to see all the little writing tricks and bullshit twists coming long before they ever get here. For that reason, it's really hard for me to finish anything on YouTube that's more than just a couple of minutes long. But something magical happens when you take pieces of a show out of context and just splice them together into one massive 10-minute chain of non sequitur idiocy. That's what this is.

It has everything I ever want in a video made by a non-professional. Surreal exchanges. Unexplained one-liners. Weird timing. Completely stupid action. It's just perfect. From the 23-second mark, where a guy gets tackled out of nowhere, to the scene at 34 seconds where Wolverine uses his claw to cut off a turkey leg and casually walks away, takes a bite, and says nothing but "... turkey." Watch that whole thing. If you can make it through that whole video without finding at least one thing to laugh at while thinking, "What the fuck?!" you're a cold, unfeeling monster.

3 Stripping the Anger from Rage Against the Machine

That's a video from a guy named Andy Rehfeldt who decided that Rage Against the Machine needed a softer touch. A smooth 1970s elevator jazzy feel. And what he ended up with was one of the funniest remakes I've ever heard. While the guitar has the same style and tone as John Mayer's early albums, he kept Zack de la Rocha's voice exactly the same. When you combine that with tens of thousands of jumping fans and the "Look how hard I'm about to rock" stances of the band, what you get is pure, unbridled genius.

And it turns out that switching styles when you have the talent to pull it off (which obviously Andy does) makes any song instantly awesome. Here's Drake singing "Best I Ever Had." In the style of polka-jazz:

2 Jean-Luc Picard Doesn't Give a Fuck

Just like the how-to videos from earlier, this is a channel you could waste your entire day watching and rewatching. The above video is one of my favorites, where Jean-Luc Picard casually practices playing the recorder while the entire ship is being torn apart in a massive battle with the Borg. People keep trying to give him updates and get instructions, which is visibly annoying him. Ships are blowing up and people are dying while he tries so hard to learn that song. And it's so bad ... which I guess is another reason it's impossible for me to not like it.

The edits, for the most part, are flawless. Except for the ones that are supposed to be horrible. And if you have the time, they have a shitload of these. Unfortunately, the last one was uploaded three years ago. I can only hope that the reason they (Jan Van Den Hemel and Andrew Hussie) stopped was because they became super famous and died from all the sex and money that was thrown at them.

1 Little Kid Plays the SHIT Out of a Xylophone

I don't know if that's a boy or a girl, because it's a tiny human with a bowl haircut and a uniform. So I'm just calling the kid Turbo Xylofucker. What you're seeing is a recital that is what you'd expect in pretty much every respect from little kids. Bad, out-of-tune music, barely keeping beat. But that one kid is worth every second of that video. It's not just the way Turbo beats the shit out of that xylophone (yes, I'm aware there is another name for the miniature version, but I don't even remotely care enough to look it up), but the intensity in which that beatdown takes place. Look at that face when (s)he rakes those sticks across that fucker:

If you had the sound off, you'd swear they were playing "Fucking Hostile" by Pantera. In fact, even having heard their song, I'm not so sure that's not correct. Especially when you see Turbo's demonic switch when the fast part comes up:

If that kid has even half that intensity 30 years from now, we're all fucked.

John has a Twitter and a Facebook fan page where he types exactly how that kid plays the xylophone.