Chop & Steele Highlights the Joy and Struggle of a Creative Partnership

There’s a kind of intimacy a long-time performing duo almost certainly needs to possess if they’re going to weather the inexorable grind of life on the road–the quiet miles in the car, the cramped motels, the lousy food. Comparable to the quiet certainty of a married couple’s surety of what the average day will bring, it’s the kind of bond in which little needs to be said out loud. Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher aren’t married, but from the opening moments of Chop & Steele, one is likely to conclude that they might as well be, for all intents and purposes. Caught in each other’s gravitational pull since childhood, the two comedians behind The Found Footage Festival have spent the majority of their lives as a binary star system, drawn together by cosmic forces. That, and a bond forged by both finding 1980s robot sitcom Small Wonder equally stupid.

Pickett and Prueher were simply two guys uniquely suited to fuel each other’s oddball senses of humor. One gets the sense that neither would have gone and founded a traveling road show like The Found Footage Festival on their own, because the very nature of the show is the act of sharing those bizarre discoveries with another person, to witness their reaction. Without each other, Pickett or Prueher might have simply chuckled at the first oddball tape they came across–a 1980s McDonald’s janitorial training video, if you were wondering–and moved on with their lives. But together, they’ve devoted the last 15 years or so to delving ever deeper into the unsettling, bizarre underbelly of the VHS era. That is, when they’re not being sued for “fraud and conspiracy” after embarrassing the hosts of a Wisconsin morning news show with a relatively benign prank, in which they posed as flamboyant, fake “strong men.” It’s that difficult era captured by Chop & Steele, a new documentary from directors Ben Steinbauer and Berndt Mader of Winnebago Man, chronicling the legal fight and aftermath of Pickett and Prueher as they reassess the goal of their operation and their dedication to outsider comedy. The breezy documentary (only 80 minutes) was acquired for distribution by Drafthouse Films in March and is currently screening at select Drafthouse locations, before it heads to VOD distribution on May 9, 2023.

With that said, any fan of The Found Footage Festival is probably well familiar already with the saga of strong men Chop and Steele, the duo cooked up by Pickett and Prueher to illustrate the embarrassing lack of vetting and research being done by small town news teams as they selected guests to feature on their shows. The hilariously awkward footage–along with clips from previous morning news pranks, involving fake celebrity chefs, or fake yo-yo professionals–has for years been part of the Found Footage Fest traveling show, delighting audiences even as the reactionary lawsuit from the parent company of one small news station sent Pickett and Prueher into an existential crisis. We wrote about the lawsuit several times at Paste, in fact, and spoke with the comedians about it in 2018 when the outcome was still in doubt. The duo eventually prevailed, though the experience was both costly and jarring, shaking the foundations of their partnership and making both members question how they wanted to approach their future collaborations. It’s this period of reaffirming what the duo is all about that we see put on display in Chop & Steele, along with some outside commentary and admiration from comedians such as David Cross, Bobcat Goldthwait, Reggie Watts and Howie Mandel. Bobcat’s segments are particularly poignant–he clearly looks at Pickett and Prueher and sees kindred spirits, as another performer with all too much experience in pushing past the boundaries of good taste.

The recaps of the lawsuit itself are necessary, but a bit perfunctory to fans of the Found Footage Festival–though it is amusing (and scary, all at once) to see footage from the duo’s day-long depositions, in which they’re grilled on such topics as their definition of the term “strong man,” or asked to confirm that stupid characters such as “Kenny ‘K-Strass’ Strasser” are not in fact real people. In one shot of Pickett, clearly trying not to overtly incriminate himself, an interviewer says “So it was a lie, that K-Strass was a yo-yo champion,” to which Pickett sheepishly replies “K-Strass was a fictional person. But in his fictional world, he was a yo-yo expert.” You can’t help but laugh at the tone of deathly seriousness that pervades these taped conversations about inherently silly topics.

Where Chop & Steele really begins to get interesting and justify its existence, however, is in its last third, as we begin to peer deeper into the daily lives of Nick and Joe, trying to understand what drives them to pursue this livelihood, and guess at how the experience of their lawsuit might affect their aversion to taking such risks again. We’re essentially watching two guys with a lifelong dependency on each other, and a seeming addiction to cringe, consider the possibility for the first time in decades of giving up some key aspect of their own identities. Through one-upmanship with each other, and a shared obsession with aberrant behavior in other human beings, they have always defined themselves by their role in bringing weirdness into the world, even if it inconveniences or actively hurts them to do it. These guys are willing to do practically anything for a joke, but the threat of losing literally everything they have in the lawsuit would seemingly represent a flashing red light from the universe, asking them to at least reconsider before diving right back in.

Nor does the pair seemingly react as a monolith. Chop & Steele makes Joe Pickett feel unshakeable and quixotic in his commitment to their strange quest, a guy for whom the correct answer is always “push it farther,” reined in only by a supernaturally understanding wife who nevertheless stops him from say, shaving his head in order to look “stupider” for another morning show prank. Even after the lawsuit, Pickett doesn’t seem to feel any particular impetus to “change,” whether we’re talking on a personal or professional level. If anything, he seems emboldened by the media support the pair received along the way as they fought the lawsuit, and you can see the wheels turning in his mind as he contemplates other indignities the duo might some day provoke.

Nick Prueher, on the other hand, is an interesting case–despite being just as dedicated to the Found Footage Festival and the pair’s zany adventures for the last few decades, there are subtle moments in Chop & Steele where the documentarians seem to be highlighting a somewhat conflicted outlook on whether he really wants to keep doing this forever. We seem to witness the duo fraying a bit at the seams, Prueher not quite meeting Pickett’s eyeline as the latter proclaims they’ll just keep rolling forever. As Prueher points out, whatever tiny cushion he might have built up through years of touring with FFF was wiped out in the lawsuit, and the pair steadfastly seems to avoid talking about the future. Perhaps he’s longing, deep down, for just a little bit of permanence and stability? We see his eyes light up as he discusses his side project of working on developing his own board games, and you can’t help but wonder at what point a side gig might graduate to a full-time vocation. It’s not that you expect either of these guys to ever end up at a truly white collar desk job–they don’t really have that in their DNA–but as the supply of undiscovered VHS in the world continues to dwindle on a yearly basis, it’s fair to at least wonder aloud whether the Found Footage Festival has a natural expiration date, whether the duo like it or not. They’re performing comedy in the face of entropy.

Following the pandemic, though, The Found Footage Festival has arguably emerged rejuvenated once again, with Pickett and Prueher’s virally enforced time apart leading to a joyous reunion as they track down the man who starred in that confounding McDonald’s training video more than three decades ago–the inspiration point for their entire quest. Now back on the road, and with a documentary about themselves in hand, ready to screen before new displays of VHS-era bizzarity, Joe and Nick are back to doing what they do best, come what may. We wish them many undiscovered exercise video caches to come.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.