 "Photo: Photo illustration by Ryan Stokes")
 "Photo: Courtesy of Nik Prueher")
There's a place where funny videotapes go to die. Flea markets, closets and used bookstores are graveyards of lost footage waiting to be found. A dedicated pair of men resurrect these tapes, searching for hidden treasures.
Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett mined mountains of discarded instructional videos, commercial outtakes and public access shows for comedy gold. These men became co-curators of a museum's worth of corny scenes and unknowingly hilarious video segments. They compiled the best moments for their Found Footage Festival.
The festival will be shown at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., Saturday at the Pageant Theatre. Admission is $9 at the door.
Prueher and Pickett will show the funniest material cut together into segments. The segments will be introduced by the creators themselves and will provide context and background for the footage.
It's not often that festivals such as this one come to the Pageant.
Tim Giusta, co-owner of the theater, remembers how popular the show was last year. It is likely that the show will sell out again this year, he said.
Live comedy in general is rare in Chico. The Found Footage Festival should prove to be an excellent example of what's missed.
The last time the festival came to town, sophomore Danny Wardwell made sure to catch it.
"It's the funniest live show I've ever seen," Wardwell said.
Wardwell is a long-time comedy enthusiast and is putting together a campus club for students who share his interest, he said. The future goals of the club include branching out and bringing more live comedy to Chico. He considers the festival's host-curators sharing of lost hilarity almost a public service.
Prueher's passion of unintentionally hilarious video began when he discovered a McDonald's sanitation instructional video, he said. The insulting video made the job seem more important than it was while trying to entertain the viewer.
The McDonalds tape sent Prueher and Pickett on a quest for more tapes, Prueher said. They searched yard and estate sales, and second-hand stores of cities they toured through.
Prueher and Pickett gather footage anywhere they can.
Once, when stopping by a FedEx location to pick up a package, Prueher noticed a rack of employee instructional videos behind the counter, he said. He grabbed them when no one was looking.
Corporate training videos are among the funniest videos, Prueher said. The corporations are clueless as to how ridiculous their videos really are.
"Whatever they were intending to do, they failed miserably," he said.
The highlight of the upcoming festival is the sexual harassment compilation. Prueher and Pickett cut out the best three minutes of "what not to do."
In addition to silly industrial videos, the duo searches through hours of public access video.
"Our favorites are people with a lot of ambition but little talent," Prueher said.
It might seem as though the festival is making fun of sincere people, but that's not necessarily the case.
"If it were mean-spirited, it wouldn't be any fun," Prueher said.
Prueher and Pickett track down the people in the videos to learn their back stories, which are sometimes more interesting than the video, he said.
On occasion, the curators will invite people to the festival to introduce the videos. Jack Rebney, the angry Winnebago man, even stayed after one screening to sign autographs.
This kind of exploration of the video's history is something people don't get when surfing Web sites such as YouTube for funny clips, Prueher said.
Randy Davenport can be reached at
rdavenport@theorion.com
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