Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have spent over 20 years mining thrift stores for obscure VHS tapes of funny and telling uncommon human behavior. On October 4, they bring their latest haul to Great Barrington. Donations welcome.
On Sunday, October 4, at 7pm, the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington hosts “Found Footage Festival: Volume 11,” a live comedy show built entirely out of VHS tapes nobody meant to keep. Hosts Joe Pickett, a contributing writer for The Onion, and Nick Prueher, a former staffer at “The Colbert Report” and ‘Late Show with David Letterman” narrate their latest finds with live commentary and updates on what happened to the people captured on tape in all their `80s and `90s glory.
Pickett and Prueher started collecting tapes in 1991 as Wisconsin teenagers after finding a training video called "Inside and Outside Custodial Duties" at a McDonald's. The show itself grew out of a documentary they couldn't afford to finish. "We were working on a documentary in, I don't know, 2004, and we ran out of money for it," Prueher recalls. "The only thing we realized is, well, we have this VHS collection we've been building up since we were in high school."
They took their living-room routine/party trick of playing tapes and joking around about them, and put it in a theater. Twenty-two years later, the documentary, Dirty Country, is finished, and the tour never really stopped. "We play 100 cities in a year," Prueher says, "and then we look at all the tapes we've collected in our travels and take a few months off and watch them. Then we're like, ‘Man, we've got to get the band back together.’"
The tapes themselves come from thrift stores, estate sales, and increasingly, from fans who bring them to shows. Prueher describes the appeal as something between professional comedy and amateur anthropology: home videos, training tapes, and instructional oddities made for audiences of a few dozen people, never intended to survive the moment they were recorded. He points to one called “Rent a Friend,” a 1987 tape in which a man addresses the lonely viewer directly and pauses for them to answer back, an early, accidental stab at cultivating parasocial relationships.
There's a video on identifying machine-made marbles made for marble collectors worried about counterfeits. There's a shelf in Pickett and Prueher’s Brooklyn office labeled simply "scarf tying." This year's volume adds a screaming pitchman named Dollar Bill, a new exercise-video montage called "Sexycises," and a New Age curiosity called "Psychic Surgery."
The show's centerpiece is a crafting instructor named Diane Thomas, whose dozen-plus tapes feature what Prueher calls crafts that are "outside the box"—dry ice deployed for no clear reason, a dead fish painted and pressed onto a towel to make a print. Curious whether she was still around, Pickett and Prueher tracked her down in Salt Lake City and flew out to spend a weekend at her house. Sunday's show includes both her original footage and a short film the pair made about the visit. "It's funny," Prueher says, "but there are moments where it's a little human interest story."
Great Barrington wasn't originally on the 2026 tour. The show's producer, Michelle Kaplan (the unusual mind behind last weekend’s orange Subaru parade), tracked Prueher down herself after finding the duo online. "She was very convincing," Prueher says. It's the act's first Berkshires stop since a 2010 show in Pittsfield.
The Found Footage Festival has sold out shows across the US, Canada, and the UK, with stops at Just for Laughs, Edinburgh Fringe, and Bonnaroo, and write-ups from the Guardian and the New York Times. Pickett and Prueher also host the weekly YouTube series “VCR Party Live!” and appear in the Tribeca-premiered documentary Chop & Steele, about a prank the duo pulled on local news stations that led to a federal lawsuit.
Found tapes are welcome at the door. "We always accept donations," Prueher says.
The Triplex Cinema, 70 Railroad Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230
Sunday, October 4, 7pm. Tickets $20 at foundfootagefest.com.
