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Found Footage Festival Pranks Midwestern Morning News Outlets

By Lisa White in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 3, 2014 7:15PM

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Morning news programs are notorious for offering up some of the most bizarre segments that keeps entertaining the viral Internet masses for years to come. So it’s no surprise that the guys behind a festival centered around found footage of the strange variety would use this medium to have a little fun while gearing up to promote their own tour.

Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, the creators of the Found Footage Festival, concocted a chef character (played by Prueher) and then were able to secure morning news segments with five stations, three in Wisconsin and two in Rockford, Ill. The kicker being that Prueher, or Chef Keith Guehrke, isn’t actually a cook with a new cookbook based on ways to use your leftovers or even real. He is simply a clumsy man with a blender and some leftover KFC. Of course the segments were ran during the holiday season, prime time for leftover excess. And in typical morning news segment fashion, even when things got gross or fell apart, everyone was all smiles.

Chef Guehrke’s whole thing is taking your leftovers and shoving them into a blender. He mixes up a mean ham, green bean, pie and gravy smoothie for one host while handing over an ice cream cone filled with gravy, mashed potatoes, corn ‘sprinkles’ and a cranberry cherry on top to another. There are obvious moments where many sane people would question “is this real life?” Like when Prueher as Guehrke brings up his choice for cutting meat out of his diet (“the average person eats a pound and a half of feces every year, no thank you!”) his inspirations (“are you familiar with GG Allin?”) or the fact a man on TV is pouring a gravy smoothie down a funnel as he proclaims “you can put six meals or more in this milk jug!” But the reporters stick it out, even when things literally collapse at the 2:55 mark. Deadspin reports that Prueher said the reporters and anchors couldn’t have been nicer to him, even after the segments went awry.

We always love a good Youtube video and a smart prank, so the Found Footage folks continue to give us something bizarre to chuckle about, much like they’ve done before. They kick off the 2014 Found Footage Festival tour this Thursday and will make a stop in Chicago on May 1 at the Music Box. You can grab tickets here if you’d like to laugh along to more bizarre videos and, like the name says, found footage.