Featuring musical bears, porch pirates and calamitous kids
We kind of lambasted the best of the 2018 Nesties – Nest’s awards for the funniest videos caught on home cameras. While previous years have yielded some fantastic home videos, this years was about as funny as an ingrowing toenail.
That’s why we’ve rounded up our favourite home camera videos – from criminals getting their comeuppance and a duo of bear home invasions, to babies getting bested by animals, this is a far more entertaining round-up.
Yes we’ve had a bigger selection of camera footage to choose from, across brands including Ring, Nest Cam, Canary, Netatmo and more. Granted, we’ve paid little regard to timings. And agreed, some of these videos border on being too serious to be mocked… but here’s the best we could find.
A midnight snack for bears
In classic kids’ tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a young girl enters a bear family’s house and sits in their chairs, eats their porridge, and sleeps in their beds. It’s a timeless morality tale which teaches children never to trespass on the property of animals with a rudimentary understanding of DIY and cooking.
In this video, the the bear has his revenge by entering the human’s house, but rather than sitting in a chair it kinda just opens the fridge a bit.
Grown man freaks out over bug
There’s something about the sound of a grown man squealing over a bug appearing on his jumper.
So many emotions encapsulated in a single noise. Panic, despair and, if we’re not mistaken, the sound of resignation, as he decides that his fate may already be sealed. “Take me, tiny insect – just make it quick.”
Bear plays piano
Another bear intruder, captured on a Canary home camera. Is someone handing out keys in woods?
Rather than raiding the fridge, this one heads straight for the piano for a quick tickle of the ivories. The result sounds uncannily like the last Radiohead album.
Porch pirate breaks leg
“Porch pirates” aren’t quite as much fun as they sound. Rather than sailing the high seas, these opportunist pillagers cruise the highways looking for unattended parcels left by delivery drivers. They then help themselves to these cardboard-clad treasure chests, which probably only contain a months’ worth of cat litter – all caught on Ring.
This particular porch pirate came a cropper when her wibbly wobbly sea legs gave out after she plundered her prize, apparently leading to a broken leg. She limps on anyway. What a trooper.
Booby trapped boxes fool porch pirates
Landlubber Jaireme Barrow of Tacoma, Washington has ensured porch pirates’ lives aren’t always plain sailing. The packages outside his door are bait, and as soon as anyone attempts to take them a blank shotgun shell fires, scaring the bejeezus out of them.
Tempted to get one to keep the pirates at bay? Jaireme has started a business, TheBlankBox, to sell his invention. Or you could go to his house and steal one from his doorstep.
Toddler trapped under dresser
Children tend to treat the whole world as an extended parkour course, but because of their stumpy limbs, immature motor development and poor understanding of physics it almost always ends in disaster. As these twin toddlers found when they pulled a dresser over, trapping one of them underneath. The other does important toddler things, like playing with a cable and climbing over said dresser, before rescuing his two dimensional brother.
Child two then joins in with the important toddler things, like looking at bears and instantaneously forgetting that he just stared death in the face.
Home Alone dog
Not a canine sequel to the Macaulay Culkin movies of the early-90s (why hasn’t that happened yet?), but a short and sweet video of a dog left at home by itself. Well, there’s also a cat.
The mutt is under explicit instructions to stay off the bed, so of course it immediately jumps on the bed and does all the things a dog can do, which turns out to be limited to rolling about and lying on its back. Bonus points for the cat, which is having none of it.
Cat takes out toddler
Another fiendish feline, and this time it takes out a toddler captured on a Canary camera. The two core tropes of the home CCTV calamity genre in one video.
We’re not sure if the cat’s actions were premeditated, or if it just so happened to collide with the child. Wait, what are we saying? It’s a cat. Of course it’s premeditated. It’s probably been planning this particular attack for decades.
Burglar climbs over open gate
The disturbing nature of a break in is offset by one thing: most burglars are complete idiots. In this clip, a pair of robbers who haven’t clocked the camera are befuddled by a garden gate.
One uses some athletic moves to vault it, while the other, slightly smarter/lazier crim simply opens it.
Runaway mower
This is definitely a real thing that happened somewhere once. The story is that Earl Lawnmower came home to find his garden had been completely ruined, and couldn’t work out why.
Upon watching the stunning HD footage from his Nest Cam, he saw that an errant football hit his ride-on lawnmower’s gearstick, disengaged all its safety features and somehow even made it do an offscreen u-turn so it could destroy his flower patch. Nothing about this was set up at all.