The Candid Camcorder : Television: ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ taps our living rooms for some home-grown humor.

When Vin Di Bona took out advertisements in TV Guide and People Magazine six months ago asking readers to send in funny home-video footage for a new TV show, he knew he’d get a response. He knew that many of the brightest moments on videotape were not stored securely in network vaults. He knew they were floating around in America’s living rooms in a vast, untapped reservoir of homemade videos.

But what the producer did not know was the electronic floodgate that he was about to open with his new ABC series, “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” In only its fifth week, the Sunday night show finished fifth among the week’s 85 prime-time programs with an audience of nearly 20 million homes, according to figures released Tuesday by the A.C. Nielsen Co. It beat CBS’ long-dominant “Murder, She Wrote” for the second week in a row.

Supporting “Video’s” ratings is a groundswell of home-grown tapes that are being sent in from viewers across the country who want to see their spots aired on national TV.

When first interviewed for this story three weeks ago, Di Bona said he was expecting as many as 1,500 videotapes a week to start rolling in soon. He miscalculated.

Videocassettes, as many as 2,000 a day , are now piling up in Di Bona’s ABC offices. They arrive at his doorstep in packages of all shapes, sizes and colors, stuffed into emptied-out boxes that once contained Meaty Bone dog biscuits, a Formfit running bra and Black & Decker power tools.

Di Bona employs a dozen videotape screeners and almost as many cataloguers who spend seven days a week in around-the-clock shifts opening packages and organizing videos to try to keep the stacks down. Still, 40-pound mail bags are heaped to the ceiling.

“You know the old adage: It’s people in their real lives who are the funniest,” said Larry Gerbrandt, TV programming analyst with Carmel-based Paul Kagan Associates. “TV is at best a pale reflection of humor in real life. The camcorder is a window into that world. You get enough video cameras out there in enough people’s hands, and eventually some hilarious and frightening things are going to happen in front of the camera. The serious things you see on the news, and the funny things you see on ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”

“We certainly have a background in this country of ‘Candid Camera’ and blooper shows,” Di Bona said. “Most of those are set-ups, putting people in a predicament and seeing what happens. Ours is a different concept. There’s no set-up involved. People are reacting to natural situations. America has a wonderful ability to laugh at itself.”

“Videos,” which airs Sundays at 8 p.m., presents amusing and unusual home video clips--punched up by cartoon sound effects of the bork , bonk , boy-yoy-yoing variety--before a studio audience. Bob Saget, a comedian and co-star of the ABC sitcom “Full House,” keeps the fast-cutting action rolling along with wise-cracking voiceovers.

“Everybody gets their Andy Warhol 15 minutes,” Saget said. “It’s like driving by and looking into people’s living rooms.”

A smattering of the humor that has been featured in the show includes a woman who’s hair got tangled in her dishwasher, an above-ground swimming pool that burst open and a bride who excused herself during wedding vows to go to the bathroom. Popular camcorder subjects are babies, animals, weddings, sporting events and birthday parties.

But there also have been generous heaps of pratfalls, blunders and tumbles. A bucking bronco that flipped over onto its back with the rider still attached. A girl who conked her head on a teeter-totter. A mother swinging on a rope who knocked her daughter head first into a shallow stream.

In each case, the producers say they have received verification that nobody was seriously injured.

“For a show that looks simple, we’ve gotten into some real complicated issues,” said Susan Futterman, the ABC standards-and-practices executive who approves every video that is shown on the air. To make sure that nobody is seen on screen who doesn’t want to be there, the producers obtain signed releases from the video camera operator and the major subjects who appear in each clip. Right now, one of the researchers is trying to track down a group of preschoolers for a clip that was taped on a naval base in Japan in 1984.

“There are always clips coming in that we can’t use,” Futterman said. “Obviously, there’s the question of taste. But more than that, you’re showing a lot of people doing things at home. If we felt something was an unsafe act to show, that if someone imitated it a child could get hurt, then we reject the clip. And we’ve received a number of those type of submissions. Some of them have to do with breathing--things being placed over a child’s head.”

In one tape sent to the show, a toddler takes a spill while trying to negotiate his walker through a grassy field. The clip was not used because it displayed an unsafe use of walkers.

Several parents have staged videotape sequences with their young children. Some of them are cute and harmless, such as a baby--guided by Dad’s unseen hands--playing the drums or lip-syncing “New York, New York.” But other tapes the producers have rejected are downright dangerous. In one unusable piece, a baby appears to be driving a moving car while one of the infant’s parents steers the vehicle from offscreen.

“We would never allow that,” Futterman said. “In the first place, any child in the front seat of a car without restraint doesn’t belong on television.”

Although most of the videos sent in to the show were taped before “Videos” was created, Futterman fears that parents or children may begin producing dangerous videotapes just to get on TV. A screener for “Videos” said he believed one couple purposely videotaped their young child falling out of a crib. The giveaway was the father’s feet, which flashed onscreen as the camera followed the baby to the ground.

To help assure that the new series has sufficient material from which to choose, “Videos” offers a $10,000 weekly prize to the best home video as voted by the studio audience. At the end of the season, the top tape will receive $100,000.

“They will never run out (of tapes),” Gerbrandt said. “There is no built-in life span for this show. The video revolution assures a constant product flow. It’s open-ended. I think the blooper shows died out because they ran out of really good bloopers. If anything, ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ is going to be inundated with material. They’re not going to be able to get through it all.”

Sure enough, the screeners, at a pace of 70 tapes a day, have their hands full. They have been bombarded with home videotapes ranging from 18 hours of one woman’s nephew (“The kid was cute, but nothing funny happened the whole time,” Di Bona said), to a guy’s pencil collection, to a childbirth on a freeway.

“The garbage ratio has skyrocketed,” video screener Tim Stokes said. “Only about one out of every 100 tapes are usable. It’s getting to the point where people are opening up their tape bins and dumping them in the mail.”

“Video’s” screeners rate the amateur videotapes, which are usually cued up to the laugh line, on a scale from 1 to 10--or the dreaded OFTTF rating: Only Funny to the Family. If a tape receives a 5 or above, it goes to the producers for consideration.

Because of the show’s unique look at American life, viewers may get the impression that “Videos” is more domestic than a Ford Escort--a TV show by Americans for Americans. But the prototype for “Videos” was made in Japan.

Last year, Di Bona was at an international TV sales bazaar in France when he spotted a Japanese variety show called “Fun With Ken and Kato Chan.” A portion of the hourlong show featured celebrity panelists voting on home-video spots. He came up with a U.S. version, just as he had done two years earlier when he turned the popular Japanese show “Waku, Waku,” a compilation of cute and furry animal clips, into ABC’s successful Saturday-morning children’s series “Animal Crack-Ups.”

Di Bona takes little credit for the creation of “Videos.” He defers to those he calls the real producers of the show.

“America has to produce this television show,” Di Bona said. “I can’t produce it. I can’t make it funny. I can’t make it interesting. I organize what people send in to us, and that’s what my main responsibility is, just to shape the show that they create.”