Candid Camera Analysis

As Allen Funt explains in his interview with Philip Zimbardo, Candid Camera hinges on five central ideas: the first being the reversal of normal or anticipated procedures. For this keystone, Funt provides the amusing example, “You pull your car into a gas station for a routine tank of gas and a five-man pit crew emerges and acts like it’s an Indy 500 pit stop.” The second idea is the exposing of basic human weaknesses in scenarios where “people try to hide the fact that they don’t understand something”—like the never-ending oil dipstick or the vertically challenged elevator. The third idea the show caters to is granting people the opportunity to fulfill a fantasy. Says Funt in relation to this idea, “We show people talking back to a traffic

Viewers get a chance to realize the ‘I wish I'd said that’ dream.” The fourth cornerstone of Candid Camera is showing how people deal with surprise—for instance, the appearance of Muhammad Ali in the classroom or a skydiver crashing through the ceiling of an office

And experimental social psychologists...have studied how social forces and the pressures of a given situation can change the way we behave, regardless of our personalities and background” (43). Many of the Candid Camera hoaxes highlight the fact that people are not accustomed to deviance from social norms. Thus, when roles are broken or reversed, the results prove laughter inducing. For instance, when the dentist launches into a sales pitch about gold-plated tooth necklaces and framed x-rays, it’s nearly impossible not to laugh at his flustered patient’s protest that, “The way our walls are set up in our house...this—this just won’t go with it.” But underlying this farcical situation is a human truth—the unfailing desire to adhere to normal social constructs. The dentist should be cleaning my teeth, our brains protest, not selling earrings bedazzled with them! Further on in the episode, during the dentist-turned-barber hoax, we encounter another universal crutch: white lies. “Please, don’t make me feel bad!” the patient pleads when the planted dentist becomes emotionally distraught after having slathered him in shaving cream, “You’re doing a good job, you are!” In this case, viewers can chuckle at the awkward situation while at the same time considering just how often they, too, voice such dishonesties in day-to-day