About

Closed Captioning FAILs, not to be confused with YouTube automatic caption fails, are a series of photographs that highlight poorly worded audio transcriptions and subtitles displayed on-screen during the broadcast of a pre-recorded or live television program.

Origin

While the exact origin of online appreciation for erroneous closed captions remains unknown, the earliest known article detailing the phenomenon of closed captioning FAILs was posted online by blogger Joe Clark on March 15th, 2006.^[9] Later that same year, FARK^[10] hosted a photoshopping contest for inappropriate or funny closed captioning in TV broadcast.

Spread

On December 4th, 2007, CollegeHumor^[4] highlighted a photograph of a televised news report with a closed caption describing people "ejaculating" in a road (shown below).

On January 5th, 2009, Flickr^[3] user PowerGeeks uploaded a photograph of a news report featuring a man driving with the caption "Bartered blow job for roof rake" (shown below).

On October 19th, BuzzFeed^[2] published a compilation of 21 news caption fails. On December 9th, 2011, Smosh^[5] highlighted several notable examples of closed caption fails. Throughout 2013 and 2014, additional compilations were featured on The Huffington Post^[6] and BuzzFeed.^[7][8]

Notable Examples

Descriptive Noise

Descriptive Noise refers to a line of text used to describe various noises heard in the background of a movie or television show in closed captioning mode. Screenshots of such scenes are often shared on Tumblr to point out the absurd nature of these descriptions when taken out of context.

External References