With respect to the short history of video art, Bob Riley discusses the televisual medium's influences on North American video artwork in terms of introducing and innovating comic horror within video narratives. Using the video work of hallmark video artists (i.e. Richard Serra, Martha Rosler...etc.) as springboards for discussion through a cultural criticism perspective, Riley states how the humorous appropriation of televisual images, codes and conventions within video art generates social commentary of the moving image as a mass medium.

Citing the 1960s ande 1970s as a period of video art innovation, Riley believes that the concurrent domination television as social mediator, home entertainment and consumption triggered contemporary "video humorists" (94) of the 1980s to actively challenge its viewership through detournement of its commercial form and content. The subversive and satirical appropriation of television in video art raises questions of its representational objectivity, privatization, social mediation (of family relationships and daily practices), consumer interpellation and spectator-subject formation.