Still Finding Footage, Twenty Years Later
UWEC grads have made a career cracking jokes about VHS oddities
Editor’s Note: Tickets to the Dec. 14 Found Footage Festival show in Eau Claire are currently sold out. But the guys still have a YouTube show and DVDs available!
Nick Prueher, a UW-Eau Claire grad and co-creator of the Found Footage Festival, acknowledges that it’s getting harder to unearth the kind of weird, obscure, and unintentionally funny videotapes that have made the touring comedy show a success for two decades.
“A lot of times we’re in a thrift store, and we say, ‘Do you have VHS?’ and they say ‘No, we just put those in the Dumpster now,’ and a single tear falls down our eye,” quipped Prueher, who will be bringing the Found Footage Fest’s 20th Anniversary Show to Eau Claire alongside co-founder Joe Pickett on Saturday, Dec. 14.
“That’s why it’s fun for us to go out on the road, even though it’s exhausting after two decades,” Prueher continued, alluding to the insatiable need to add to the duo’s 13,000-tape collection, which includes everything from the world’s angriest RV salesman to countless exercise tapes to the infamous “Rent-A-Friend” (which is pretty much what it sounds like).
“The traveling is a lot, but it makes you realize why you’re still doing it when you go to an untapped Goodwill in Wyoming and you find 200 tapes that you haven’t seen before. It’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to keep doing this even though we’re almost 50.’ ”
Carving out such a career was the furthest thing from the minds of Prueher and Pickett when they started sharing funny videotapes with friends in the early 1990s in their hometown of Stoughton, Wisconsin. In those pre-Internet, pre-YouTube, pre-streaming TV days, VHS was king, and they were kids looking to entertain each other. (Their first discovery: a cringe-worthy McDonald’s janitorial training video.)
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A lot of times we’re in a thrift store, and we say, ‘Do you have VHS?’ and they say ‘No, we just put those in the Dumpster now,’ and a single tear falls down our eye.
NICK PRUEHER
FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL
Later in the ’90s, they continued to hone their hobby in the UWEC dorms. “In Eau Claire we should have been studying, but we would have friends over and pop in our latest VHS finds … and we’d developed kind of a running commentary of jokes,” Prueher said.
Fast-forward to 2004, and both found themselves working in New York (Prueher at David Letterman’s Late Show, Pickett at The Onion), when a friend presented a comedy show with a screen and a projector. The proverbial lightbulb moment hit, and their just-for-friends routine of bizarre video clips became a live show in front of a paying audience. Soon they began touring the nation and even overseas, and the Found Footage Festival became a comedic mainstay.
“It was just in the zeitgeist that people were ready to look back at that VHS era and laugh,” Prueher reflected on the festival’s origins. From the beginning, he said, “Joe and I weren’t exceptional students, but we were exceptional at understanding irony.”
Twenty years on, the duo are still riding that wave of ironic nostalgia, and the Found Footage Fest has spawned merch (including a DVD box set packaged to look like a VCR) and a weekly YouTube show (“VCR Party Live!”) Most importantly, this longevity has presented the opportunity for a 20th Anniversary Show, which Prueher said will feature a mix of old favorites and new videos (including an appearance by the original actor from that long-ago McDonald’s training video).
As it happens, the fest itself was founded just a year before the birth of YouTube, which changed video consumption forever. At first, Prueher admits, they were worried that YouTube would spell the end for the Found Footage Festival. However, they realized, there was something missing from YouTube’s endless stream of personally curated online videos: the opportunity to sit in a theater and laugh at them together.
“The fun part for us is the transformative experience of watching it in a group,” he said. “I have people at our merch table trying to show me a funny video on their phone, and I’m like, ‘No, that’s not the right way to watch this.’ (The right way is) projected on a huge screen in a dark theater with a bunch of other weirdos.”
If doing that with “a bunch of other weirdos” sounds like fun, check out the Found Footage Festival’s 20th Anniversary Show at 7:30pm Saturday, Dec. 14, at Oh Claire Improv, 515 Wisconsin St., Eau Claire. Tickets are $16 and can be found online at volumeonetickets.org.
