While you were busy pumping out your basement this week, this Bradford resident was doing a bit of super sleuthing…

There’s been a mystery baffling me since late fall. You see, one night back in November, I was driving home after an especially soul-crushing day spent languishing in my cubicle, when I rounded a corner on 125 and came face to face with this:

“Whaaaaat!?” I thought. Then I had to pull over to the side of the road I was laughing so hard. This is nearly Banksy-level shizz! Right here in Bradford! Amazing!

This moment was the very first to give me hope for the coolness of my city.

Ever since that fateful night, I’ve been keeping an eye out similar acts of awesomeness, all the while dying to know who the responsible party might be.

So, while it’s been pouring buckets these past few days I’ve been on a mission to uncover the truth…and I finally cracked the case!

While I can’t explain my investigative methods, for fear of spoiling the anonymity of the street artists behind the billboard hack, I did get the scoop on their motivation.

Says one of the artists:

“We’re into finding places to explore and leaving our mark in subtle ways that are more for humor than anything else. Obviously in this case it was just taking a jab at a bad comedian haha.

For instance, if we see a face that we find funny on a billboard or wherever, we’ll oftentimes dash out to the billboard in the dead of night, cut out the face using a box cutter, and then, using wallpaper glue, paste the face somewhere obscure and random, where if someone sees it, it’ll make their day. We don’t like these things to be too obvious, because we want it to stay up for at least a little while, so we tend to put them in areas people don’t tend to look in (but it’s usually something ballsy like the inside of an overpass on the highway or side of a bridge.)

So, if you have ever passed a billboard with it’s face cut-out (like that one in Bradford that they put up three times)… That’s us. Just a bunch of dudes having fun and trying to make people laugh or go ‘what??’ without spray painting or doing any permanent damage to anything. It’s all pretty ephemeral stuff, but I guess it’s sorta like building a sandcastle in that it’s fun to do anyway.”

So, there you have it. Case closed!

And, I really shouldn’t brag about my sweet detective skills, so I’ll defer to our mystery artist once again:

“By the way, really good detective work on your part. Bravo.”