For that failure to end in a flaming vehicle shouldn’t be funny, but judging by the comments on the video, it clearly is. The appeal of the gender-reveal disaster video is rooted in contempt: It’s a schadenfreude delivery system, comeuppance porn for a new kind of social overreach. Each video originates as a homespun production, documenting a moment of great significance to a handful of people. Great care and elaborate planning, obsessive pomp and circumstance, have been devoted to announcing the very first thing most parents know for certain about the child they expect and all the cultural baggage that child will be burdened with. And when it all goes wrong, it exposes a surprisingly intimate moment of cognitive dissonance and uncertainty — the very kind of anxiety and lack of control that gender-reveal stunts are designed to dispel.

It’s like that saying about how to make God laugh: Just tell him your plans. Anyone who has noticed that the world does not divide, neatly and comfortably, into guns and glitter, touchdowns and tutus, will know that this whole ritual is set up, like a Jenga tower, for the fall. A good car-on-fire video is cathartic in that it cuts straight to the dramatic reversal, without having to wait 10 or 20 years to watch all the colored smoke dissipate and reveal messy human individuals, full of surprises and contradictions, in the place of ossified symbols of masculinity and femininity. A gender-reveal disaster plays the whole thing out in under a minute, with all the thrilling neatness of a 1970s disaster movie, in which a particular kind of overconfidence is inevitably punished by God, or by physics.

Come to think of it, these could be the disaster movies of our time. All the right components are there: human folly, hubris, typecasting, flames. When you click happily on the latest gender-reveal failure, you watch for the satisfaction of seeing certainty upended — not majestically, on the big screen, over the course of three hours, in Sensurround, but on the small one, with a cast of a dozen, in one calamitous instant.