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If we’ve learned anything about viral advertising in 2011, it’s this — you can’t touch The Force. Also, people will always love crazy stunts and action-packed destruction — especially if there are Angry Birds thrown into the mix.

Pop culture references, especially when Internet-related, also seemed to do really well this year. From the Royal Wedding to LMFAO, using someone or something that has a strong following always helps in achieving viral reach. And if that doesn’t work, consider a male stripper or a monkey with an AK-47.

We also learned that people like to be tricked. The more realistic your stunt is, the better. There are a couple videos that made the list this year that make you question whether the ad was staged or real, which always leads to sharing.

If nothing else, there are a few touching videos that will leave you affected. From cute children talking about their relationship to the more serious topic of cancer, this list just goes to show that emotive videos can still cut through all the noise on the web.

Special thanks to our friends at Unruly for compiling this list.

Note: The list below does not include music videos, user-generated content or movie trailers. Unruly’s Viral Video Chart tracks 18 million shares a day through third-party APIs.

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Fear Factor is back! Five years after being booted off the air, NBC’s gross-out stunt show returned to TV Monday night and dominated the social TV conversation.

Viewers generated more than 403,000 comments across social media websites during the two-hour premiere, according to data from Bluefin Labs. The reality show attracted 47% of all social comments for Monday’s primetime shows, beating out WWE Monday Night Raw (10%) and NFL Monday Night Football (9%).

Viewers were kept abuzz, thanks to gross stunts, action-packed challenges and commentary from host Joe Rogan. A cringe-tastic scorpion scene — in which teams of two fetched the eight-legged creatures out of black sludge and then ate 10 of them — was Fear Factor‘s high point of social media activity. That scene helped the show’s first hour net 218,000 comments compared to hour two’s 185,000 comments.

To put that data into perspective, The X Factor premiere in September garnered 190,000 comments. The X Factor is 2011′s number one social TV show in series programming, Bluefin Labs reports, and also routinely tops Mashable‘s weekly “20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz” list.

The Fear Factor contestants were competing to win $50,000. Stunts like these made the show, which first premiered in 2001, popular in the days before Twitter and Facebook. In those previous episodes, contestants devoured “delicacies” including cow bile, buffalo testicles and cave-dwelling spiders. Twitter publicly launched in July 2006, just a few months before NBC canceled Fear Factor.

Bluefin told Mashable that two other scenes stood out and incited plenty of comments. In one, Rogan says, “I hug my mom, but I let go,” referring to a close relationship between a mother-son team. In another, Rogan calls a contestant the “whitest man in America” and that he’d do well auditioning for future Twilight movies.

Check out Bluefin’s data below to see the Fear Factor moments that got viewers typing away. To watch the episodes online, click here. The scorpion scene starts about 20 minutes in.

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If a viral video hits the Internet and millions of people have not yet watched it, is it still a viral video? How can these cute karate-kicking toddlers not make it big with their strangely intense, undeniably adorable fight to the death.

Both fighters have gathered in the pit, the audience roars with their tiny voices, a sensei watches to declare a winner, and one of the boys’ mothers laughs in the background. Okay, the video isn’t quite Thunderdome with all those missed kicks and incessant bouncing but shoot if the two combatants aren’t bouncing with rage.

The fight looks like a friendly and totally safe match at a Taekwondo school, but we think the kid in blue, with his high kicks, backwards leg-kick-things and stoic bounce has some serious promise.

It’s nice to see that actual humans are trying to reclaim the viral throne from kittens around the world, though at time of writing “The most intense taekwondo fight ever” had just 302 views, while racking up more than 10,000 likes and 257 dislikes.

Are you a hater, a lover or a fighter? And if you had to put money on one kid, who do you think won? Let us know in the comments below. We’re sticking with blue.