Apparently it’s really easy to get on a morning TV show, even if your credentials are completely made up.
Chef Keith Guerke made five morning show appearances throughout the Midwest during the holidays to promote his new cookbook on how to turn leftovers into something amazing. But there's one big problem: Chef Guerke isn’t a real chef. And those recipes of his aren’t even close to appetizing.
The fake chef character is actually the creation of Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, co-founders of the Found Footage Festival, a show that compiles the most outrageous old VHS footage -- from exercise tapes to home movies -- into a show full of strange and downright laughable segments.
The duo began doing morning talk shows in every city where the Found Footage Festival was touring. They grew bored with going on and simply asking people to go out and see the festival. Over the holidays, they decided to try something a little different.
“We’re both from Wisconsin, so we were back there for the holidays and we got bored, so this is what we decided to do for fun,” Prueher, who played Chef Keith, told The Huffington Post. “We hate doing morning talk shows. We realized we were always on after the chef segment so we thought that’s the easiest thing to get booked.”
According to Prueher, none of the people working on the talk shows had any idea they were being tricked. Even when they were being handed something as outrageous as a mashed potato ice-cream cone with corn sprinkles, or when a table with all the ingredients fell over, or when Chef Keith tried to rap.
“Believe it or not, most of the time the hosts would politely thank me and say they were sorry that the segment didn’t go better,” Prueher said of his brief stint as the world’s worst leftovers chef. “But they were the always the ones apologizing to me.”
The video was posted online Monday to promote the 10th anniversary tour of the festival. The 3-minute clip was cut from a longer segment that gets played live at the show.
This isn’t the first time the Found Footage crew (or at least part of it) has pranked talk shows. Their K-Strass yo-yo prank from a few years ago featured a character co-created by Joe Pickett and his friend Mark Proksch, who poses as an inept yo-yo "professional."
When asked if their new method of promoting their festival with pranks was effective, Prueher simply laughed and said it was “certainly a lot more fun for us.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed Prueher as a co-creater of K-Strass and said that Mark Proksch was recently unemployed before his morning show appearance.