Film festival finds humor in discarded clips

What do ’80s exercise tapes, children’s musicals and an instructional video for a masturbation device all have in common? Seemingly nothing. But when put together, they’re all kind of funny.

Marking its fifth anniversary, the Found Footage Festival, a live comedy show and screening hosted by childhood friends Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, returns to Los Angeles Sept. 24 to splice together clips from old VHS tapes to place a whole new comedic spin on forgotten footage.

“[The new show is] what people have grown to love,” said Pickett, co-founder of the festival. “These are exclusive videos you can’t see anywhere else.”

Like the name of the festival suggests, all the videos featured must be found either by the hosts themselves or others who submit them.

As a result, the hilarious duo, with combined credits from the Onion, The Colbert Report and The Late Show with David Letterman, can often be spotted digging through thrift stores, garage sales and even Dumpsters to find the best of the worst.

“A lot of people expect stupid Internet video, but that’s not the case at all. It’s more of a guided tour of videos that we’ve become obsessed with,” Pickett said.

“We’re curators, and we take people through a guided tour of found videos,” Prueher added.

After officially kicking off the tour in April 2004, the pair embarked on its quest for bad footage from the beginning.

As a sophomore in high school, Prueher worked at a McDonald’s in Wisconsin, where he was intrigued by a custodial training video that he found in the fast-food restaurant’s break room. The front cover of the video claimed it featured celebrities.

“[The video] was worth popping in to see what it was all about … I just could not believe how dumb it was, especially considering the size of the corporation of McDonald’s,” Prueher said. “I got to thinking that if there were videos this dumb, sitting around in break rooms collecting dust, that there has to be more cool stuff right under our noses.”

When Prueher showed the video to Pickett, it spawned a shared lifelong obsession that has steamrolled into a full-blown comedy show, complete with prerecorded bits and live sketches.

“Stupid videos are, for whatever reason, my passion. Some people have a passion for teaching children, and mine is watching these stupid videos,” Pickett said.

Organizing the show, however, isn’t a light affair. The two have to sift through hours of tapes to find the few needles in the haystack worth playing to a general audience.

“We’re sort of masochists that way. We have a pretty high tolerance for bad video,” Prueher said. “We find that one piece of footage that … You know is bad in just the right way is what makes it worth it for us. We just can’t wait to show it to people.”

The two consider themselves brothers, with a relationship spanning decades that provides a common background, keeping them going even through the arduous month-long editing process.

“It’s a safety in numbers thing,” said Pickett. “We hold hands and we dive in headfirst.”

Highlights for the LA show include completely new footage coupled with background stories and potential guest stars.

A new segment called “Adrian’s Corner” consists of videos they procured from a previous audience member, who invited them back to his home.

They stayed up until 6 a.m. watching the bizarre video collection while also admiring his other odd collections, including Barbies and photographs of barbecues.

“It’s the greatest job in the world. You get to go around and watch stupid videos and people bring stupid videos to you,” Prueher said. “We’re not getting rich off of this by any means, but it’s just cool.”

Prueher and Pickett also attempt to contact the people featured in their show, hoping to find out the back story and to invite them to participate.

“For us, meeting a guy from the McDonald’s training video is equivalent to someone else meeting Tom Cruise,” Prueher said.

As celebrities in their own right, guest stars often have audience members lining up for their autographs and to take their pictures.

“They go from total obscurity to slightly less obscurity,” said Prueher.

Over the years, the part-film festival, part-comedy show has attracted a cult following, with one fan attending six shows in one tour.

“We’re kind of amazed that our circle of friends finds this stuff as funny as we do,” Prueher said. “It’s part of the fun, taking a video or work that can be seen in public and putting it on a screen and getting a bunch of people in a room saying, ‘It’s okay to laugh at these.’”

Eventually, the creators envision turning the show into more than just a hobby, and hope to one day replace television’s classic, America’s Funniest Home Videos.

“We’re trying to make the world’s funniest live show of all time,” Prueher joked. “Actually, we never really had any goals other than we just wanted to show our video collection to people. That makes us happy and hopefully makes people who come happy, too.”