One for the Road: Best served poetic and viral

Whether you’re the sort of easy-going, slightly delusional internet user who views their chronic browsing addiction as just a bit of innocent entertainment, or a more self-aware, but equally hopeless scrolling junkie who knows in their heart of hearts how ultimately hollow their smart phone obsession truly is, chances are, whether you know it or not, you’ve probably lost at least a few hours of your life to what are known as ‘instant karma’ videos.

Am I right?

It’s 2025 – ‘course I’m right.

Instant karma videos, otherwise known as instant justice videos or comeuppance clips, have been doing the rounds for years.

I just about remember the early days of YouTube, when there were only about 100 videos on the website and half of them involved somebody incurring some pretty serious physical injury in a way that, despite often looking like they might never be the same again, was, somehow, still funny to watch.

One that still stands out vividly in my mind – in all the pixelated, low-definition splendour I first saw it in – is a clip that was caught at what appeared to be a college basketball game, in which a child, running behind the hoop at a velocity suggestive of some kind of lavatorial red alert, is struck unconscious mid-stride when a player’s last second Hail Mary three-pointer misses its target and smacks the wee cub flush on the side of the head.

He goes down like a sack of spuds. The crowd goes quiet like a nest of mice. And the McElhatton clan, crowded around the family computer circa 2007, went ha-ha-ha like a load of sickos.

But this video, though hilarious, was not an example of what would only a few years later become known as an instant karma video.

Why not?

Because the wee guy had committed no crime – neither legal, moral nor otherwise – before being knocked rotten by the heavy rubber ball.

Therefore, my family’s enjoyment was pure schadenfreude, which, while part of the equation that makes these videos so irresistibly satisfying, is not the entire formula.

The other key component, of course, is justice.

See, for the internet to serve up the sort of reaffirming caught-on-camera poetic justice of the kind that instant karma videos specialise in, there must always be a villain, which is why the best ones always begin with some sort of David v Goliath dynamic that offends, even disgusts, our sense of right and wrong: A big bully refuses to stop smoking next to a mother and her eight-year-old daughter on a New York subway; an up-and-coming boxer, odds-on favourite, gives his shy opponent dog’s abuse at the press conference; a masked man, kitchen knife in hand, demands the elderly shopkeeper empty the till.

After the moral battlefield is set, what follows next is why we clicked.

The mother, having asked the big guy to stub out his fag several times now, loses patience and unleashes a volley of black-belt-grade karate kicks to your man’s crotch, torso and head, before he has a chance to exhale.

Fight night arrives. The cocky boxer lands a good shot in the first round, sticks his chin out to showboat and his shy, unassuming adversary catches him with a fight-finishing uppercut he never saw coming.

The masked man, after nabbing a few twenties, makes for the door, slips on the wet floor and falls flat on his back, giving the pensioner time to retrieve his mop from the bucket, ring the cops and stand over the would-be burglar, mop cocked back like a batter at the base, until the boys in blue arrive.

Yep. I’ve probably lost days to these videos, smiling, gloating and laughing.

Maybe it’s part of some subconscious Freudian mission to restore my childhood belief that, even in a world that so often seems amoral at best, there’s some cosmic debt collector out there making sure everyone gets what they’re owed.

Or maybe we watch in the spirit of 16th Century Protestant martyr John Bradford, who famously said – presumably right before pointing and laughing – “There but for the grace of God go I.”