Chop and Steele's Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher Talk Turning Trauma Into Triumph
One of the most dreaded elements of being a touring comedian is the lengths you must go to in order to promote your upcoming appearances, largely because you get booked on early-morning news shows that are looking to fill time as opposed to actually engaging with you. For comedians Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, these appearances grew so tiresome that they would find ways to entertain themselves with small dares and pranks, leading to the discovery of just how easy it was to create fictional people with fictional skills and book them on genuine news programs. What started as a harmless way to poke fun at the concept of these morning programs resulted in them being sued by a massive media conglomeration, who were embarrassed that their strongman duo of Chop and Steele had been allowed to perform their feats of "strength" live on air. Pickett and Prueher's journey is chronicled in the new documentary Chop and Steele, which the comedians are touring with in the coming weeks.
In addition to occasionally pulling a fast one on morning shows, Pickett and Prueher have been touring with their Found Footage Festival for nearly two decades. In a world dominated by streaming platforms, VHS tapes feel less like outdated relics to consume media so much as they feel like anthropological artifacts from an ancient society, but for the Found Footage Festival, they are a treasure trove of the highs and lows of humanity. With only a fraction of all VHS tapes making their way to DVD, and then an even smaller fraction of that media being available to stream, the world of VHS tapes brings a limitless wealth of delight to Pickett and Prueher, thanks to bizarre exercise routines, home videos, and infomercials, the pair deliver their best, worst, and weirdest discoveries with their live show and also their weekly YouTube series, VCR Party.
Having tracked down a handful of the subjects from their VHS tapes, Pickett and Prueher teamed up with director Oscar Harding in hopes of learning more about Charles Carson. Harding's A Life on the Farm celebrates the odd life of an eccentric farmer in rural England whose bizarre home movie has become a cult phenomenon around the world. Carson's life and work are remembered by those who knew him best, and a new generation of fans reflect on the inspiring legacy he left behind.
ComicBook.com caught up with Pickett and Preuher to talk their new films, their most cherished VHS artifacts, and the impact an impending lawsuit can have on a lifelong friendship. You can learn more about Chop and Steele at the film's official website, which the pair will be touring with starting on April 13th at select Alamo Drafthouse locations, alongside screenings of A Life on the Farm. Chop and Steele will be landing on VOD on May 9th.
ComicBook.com: I know your work in so many different capacities from VCR Party, the Found Footage Festival, and now Chop and Steele. How do normally describe to someone who you might have just met what your job is or what you do? Because it covers so many arenas and, if you told someone while promoting Chop and Steele, "Well, we did this prank," they might assume you're just a member of Jackass.
Nick Prueher: If you figure out how to do it, let me know, because my grandparents all went to their graves not knowing what I do. I'm still trying on my living grandma, but she's no closer to grasping it.
I tell people that it's a guided tour through my childhood friend, Joe, and my VHS collection where we track down the people in the videos, we lavish them with far more attention than they even deserve, and we curate these video relics that would otherwise be lost for the ages. Since we've known each other so long and have been on the road together so long, we come up with stupid things to entertain ourselves. We ran out of things to talk about, so to make each other laugh, we started going on morning news shows and daring each other to do things, and then eventually booking people who weren't us and pretending to be those people.
Joe Pickett: We called this the "Long Walk Tour" because we're touring Chop and Steele right now, the documentary, but we have to always back up and talk about Found Footage Festival. "Okay, then we got sued in federal court." So it's the "Long Walk Tour." There's a lot to explain.
It's hard to turn into an elevator pitch of exactly what your lives are.
Pickett: It's got to be a really long elevator.
Prueher: Tall building.
Like the Willis Tower in Chicago.
Pickett: Oh, good, local reference.
With Chop and Steele and the events that led up to all of this, everything came with what you probably assumed were low-stakes risks, wondering what's the worst that could happen? And now you've realized one of the worst things that can happen, but I know you probably still have the itch to pull some pranks. Do you think a prank has to have some element of risk to it? You can't really say, "Well, we don't want to do that because it could bite us in the ass, we can do this much safer thing," but does doing the safer thing then undercut what you're really trying to pull off?
Pickett: I know what you're saying, but here's the thing: Nick and I aren't prank guys first. We don't want to be lumped into the pranker group because we basically just did one prank. The rest of the stuff that we do when we get on these morning news shows, it's just to entertain ourselves.
We used to do something called the two-word-phrase challenge, where right before we would go on a morning news show, this is early on in Found Footage days, we'd go on Wake Up Sacramento or something. I would whisper two words into Nick's ear and he would try to say them on the air. I remember the best one was "basketball murderers." He had to say "basketball murderers" together and "murderers" had to be plural. Of course, he f-cking knocked it out of the park. He always does. How did you work in "basketball murderers"?
Prueher: It was getting towards the end of the interview and the guy said, "Well, who are the kinds of people who make these videos you find?" Then the light bulb went off and I said, "Oh, they could be crazy. They could be basketball murderers for all we know. But getting back to the videos..." It's one of those things.
Pickett: Didn't bat an eye. So that's a very low-stakes, I guess, prank. I don't know if it's really a prank. I think it's something more trying to entertain ourselves. Like Nick said, we're on the road and we get bored. We're also from a small town in Wisconsin where you have to figure out how to entertain yourself, so little, dumb things like that. I think with a prank, as long as it's funny, as long as somebody laughs at it, as long as one person laughs at it. Like "basketball murderers," it was just Nick and I laughing at that one. Nobody else even batted an eye at it. It just went up into the ether and went away forever.
Anytime I've watched a documentary or anything over the past three years, anytime there's a title card that says "March 2020," you know that this is where it gets very depressing. With Chop and Steele, that sequence dives at least a little bit more into how Nick may be questioning whether he wants to do this anymore. There is a little bit of tension there. Joe, were you at all aware that Nick was feeling that pull in other directions?
Pickett: I don't know. Again, we're from Wisconsin. We just put blinders on to stuff like that. That's the way that we've been brought up. I'm happy in the direction that I'm at, so I'm going to assume Nick is, too.
I would say not generally. Generally, I knew that he was tired of touring and it wasn't as fun for him because he doesn't drink as much as I do. I love going out to the bars afterwards and mingling. It's a party afterwards. But Nick, he's not into that as much. I don't know, this is my theory.
And there's not as many vegan ... Nick's vegan, too, and I'm a hog. I eat anything. So I go out and I'm like, "Oh, I want to try the new food and everything," and Nick's like, he has to find an Earth-mother restaurant and it's not easy. I think touring takes more of a toll on Nick than it does on me. I guess I never really noticed how much it bothered him until I saw the documentary.
Along those lines, Nick, whether it be this movie or doing America's Got Talent, along the way, how do you feel that the figures of Chop and Steele have changed your relationship? Either just the trauma-bonding of your friendship or the touring aspect, how has the whole experience changed you?
Prueher: If you're looking for a spark to get back into a relationship, I do recommend getting sued federally together. I think there's nothing like having that common enemy of a news conglomerate that brings you closer together.
But yeah, like Joe said, we don't really talk about anything serious. We've designed our lives to have it be very low stakes and not have a boss and anything like that. So to actually have a big company come against you and threaten what you do and your way of life, it was a bonding experience.
When you went into America's Got Talent, I won't spoil the events of that, but when you went into that, did you have a specific outcome in mind or do you think when it comes to doing just these small things to entertain yourselves, can you not even think about ideal outcomes and it's really just about doing the thing and then just seeing what happens?
Pickett: No, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have a good outcome. If we're going to go ahead and do this, we're going to rehearse it. For this America's Got Talent thing, thank you for not spoiling the big surprise in there, but we actually did practice this at Nick's place in his bathtub. We knew that we were going to get on stage and that this would happen. I think it was everything that we wanted it to be.
I would've made a few changes to the wardrobe. I'm trying to be mysterious here because I don't want to give away what it is, but generally, yeah, the outcome is important to us.
That was the most stressful day of my life. I've pinpointed that day at America's Got Talent as the most stressful day of my life because we flew out there, we do all this stuff, and we've just got to get it right, and if we don't get it right, then this whole thing is wasted and there's no story here.
Speaking back to how tricky it is to describe what it is the two of you do or to contextualize it in regards to Chop and Steele, do you feel like you are living your ideal career or is there a way that you'll be able to transition this into another higher concept, either a team-up thing that you do further on or you both spin off and do your own solo things?
Prueher: I don't know what the next thing is. We're doing what we want to do right now. I think the one thing I would say would be nice is to actually find a way to monetize what we do, because 19 years in, we still haven't figured it out. It'd be nice to make a living wage while doing these things that entertain ourselves. I've had to take a day job and there's little side projects that come up all the time. I think the time I know where we'd be successful is if we're able to live comfortably while doing what we do and just that.
Pickett: We've been at the poverty line for a long time as far as ... Not actually. I would say we have maybe five revenue streams right now and none of them are that good. But I don't know, we're working on it. We're hoping this movie takes us to the next level, but I don't know. It's just all we know at this point.
We've taken day jobs before. We worked on a reality show about rattlesnake hunters a decade ago. Then we worked on this sh-tty daytime clip show a few years ago. I don't know, I'm always miserable whenever I'm at these things, having to write for somebody else's voice. Then I'll write something that I think is hilarious and they'll be like, "No, no, no, no, no. Broaden it. Broaden it."
I can't do it. I take the job because I like the money, and it's like, "Oh, look at me. I have a regular job. It's so cool. I get a regular paycheck and there's a 401(k) and all that stuff." But that clip show, when it went away, they cancelled the show after six months, I was just like, "Yes, I can go back to doing what I do."
Prueher: Two decades into doing something, you realize, "Oh, I guess this isn't a career." But yeah, if any readers have any ideas about how to make money doing what we're doing, please put it in the comments.
Pickett: Or money. If they have money, too. We have a Patreon. We should plug the Patreon.
I don't think this is a spoiler, because it's at least included in the trailer, that Howie Mandel, you were able to get him to sit down to talk about that experience a little bit. Without spoiling, has anything come of that or was he just polite enough to participate and then he went back to America's Got Talent? Do you have any plans brewing with Howie?
Pickett: When that interview was shot, we weren't there for it. The director had shot that. So the first time we saw it, I think was actually with an audience at Tribeca because they had just plopped it into the final edit at the last second, so that was a shock to me that he actually said in there, "I want to work with these guys."
We're out in L.A. right now and our agent reached out to him and he's taping AGT this week. We're not going to meet with him this week, but I don't know. I come back to L.A. all the time, so hopefully down the road. But he did say that in the movie, that he wants to work with us on something, and he's hilarious in the movie, too.
I used to work at the movie theater and one time I thought I saw Suspiria star Jessica Harper there, I thought I tore her ticket. A decade goes by, I finally interview her, and I say, "Is it possible that you went to this movie theaters 10 years ago?" She was like, "Possibly. I have family out there." You two have McC, you have Melinda, you have these small, low-stakes mysteries of people from your VHS tapes that you get to solve and it only matters to you. What is it that is so fulfilling about finding the answers to those mysteries? Also, you tracked down McC, but do you have any other elusive figures that still continue to be a white whale that you haven't gotten to track down?
Prueher: I think for us, we made a feature-length documentary of our own because we found a cassette tape at a truck stop and we were so intrigued, we had to go find the guy.
As funny as a lot of our VHS clips are, there is some anthropological value we find in them. It's like capturing this moment in time and you want to know what they were thinking and what the backstory was. It's fun to go digging and then actually meet the people and find out the story just, I think, for our own human curiosity.
There's one guy we really want to meet now. We've been collecting local commercials over the last few years, especially in our internet show, VCR Party. We play a lot of local commercial jingles. What we found out was that a lot of the best, catchiest jingles were all written by this one guy named Otis in Dallas. We want to commission him to write a jingle for us and meet him and find out what the secret is. But so far, he's been elusive. He hasn't returned any of our emails.
Pickett: There was a writer, I can't remember where this writer was from, but I think that this writer put, I think, what we do into perspective pretty well. He said something like, "So you guys are really into unimportant people." I was like, "That's a harsh way of putting it," but I think it's true. Or somebody who, I wouldn't phrase them as unimportant, but people who did a thing and probably forgot about that thing, but we didn't forget about that thing, and we've watched that thing be done a thousand times. So when we finally get to meet these people, it's like meeting Tom Cruise for a typical person. We met Jack Rebney. We met Frank Pachowski. We've met John and Johnny. We've met all of our heroes.
I would say one right now that I'm dangerously close to meeting is this video that David Cross gave us called "Flower Power." It's this pitch for a movie hosted by this hippie and he's taking you through, he is showing these illustrations. It's legendary. Look up "Flower Power." But somebody reached out and said, "Hey, I think this is 'DR Live,' the guy from the video." I emailed him and it was him and he's excited about it. He's still trying to make the movie. He sent a picture of him now and he looks like God. He looks like actual God, like right out of the Bible.
It really does add a sense of perspective. My frame of reference for pranks is Jackass, even though there are people called the "Impractical Jokers" that your average person might be more aware of, but for me, that wasn't even a point of reference at all. So yeah, it is that some people want to meet Tom Cruise, other people want to meet the cast of Frisbee F-ckers or whatever. That quest also ties into A Life on the Farm, the film that you'll be touring with.
I know this might be something you have a go-to answer for or you cannot simply boil it down to one, but if there was a natural disaster at your VHS warehouse or VHS office, is there one tape that, whether it be for sentimental reasons or for posterity of the future of humanity, is there an artifact that would be your go-to tape that you would rush to in an emergency to rescue?
Pickett: It's definitely a video called "It Only Takes a Second." It's this industrial safety video that, when I was working right out of college, this is before we started Found Footage Festival, we started doing these things. I didn't know how to edit at the time. I worked at a video duplication house and this company would come in, this insurance company. They brought in these incredible safety videos. This one, it was the first one they ever brought in.
It's reenactments of people getting hurt over and over and it's just four minutes of just the densest, just pure enjoyment. They're trying to be serious with this. They're trying to scare people into being safe, but I made a copy for myself and that's the one, that's like my "Rosebud," I would say. That's the one that I want to be buried with.
Prueher: "Nude Bowling Party," no explanation needed.
I'm sure some people will think, "Oh, I bet he is going to say 'Bunion Surgery.'" It's like, "No, he's not going to go with 'Bunion Surgery.'"
Pickett: Nick, you've got to go with bunion surgery. You found that one.
Prueher: No, I think the real one for me would be "McC," the McDonald's training video I saw while in high school working a miserable job at McDonald's. That one, we do have it in this little protective plexiglass thing at the office now because it is a cherished artifact, and at least for me, that set me on the journey of, "What footage is lurking right under our noses that could be funny?"
I'm glad that you humored all the supporters of Nick being a sexual man that you said "Nude Bowling Party."
Prueher: I need to give something to the Melindas there.
Pickett: He gives the people what they want: sexuality.
You can learn more about Chop and Steele at the film's official website, which the pair will be touring with starting on April 13th at select Alamo Drafthouse locations, alongside screenings of A Life on the Farm. Chop and Steele will be landing on VOD on May 9th.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter.
