By Dennis Harvey

'FOLK ART' is one of those terms that started out as affectionate and legitimizing, then began smacking of condescension once people thought too much about it. What separates fine art from folk art, anyway? Tuition-paid "formal" training? Complexity and/or ironic simplicity? Knowledge of the art form's history and conventions? A hope that, theoretically, somebody might actually pay for it? Art made solely for your own pleasure may be one definition of "folk" or "amateur" work. Yet as we all know, no degree of alleged professionalism can guarantee an objet won't suck.

Who makes movies private yet elaborate or eccentric enough to be considered folk art? Discount camcording kids (or their 8mm predecessors, like the teenage Spielberg and the Kuchar brothers) playing pretend Star Wars and such. What grown-ups are there? Perhaps there's an underground of activity we may never know about – or only will posthumously, in the way Henry Darger's fantastic life's work surfaced when his dingy apartment required emptying out.

It feels lucky, then, to get wind of somebody like Phil Chambliss while he's still out there being dingy, as yet uncorrupted by the fickle chorus of public – i.e., high-end public arts institution – approval. Chambliss is a 52-year-old native of Camden, Ark., who works the graveyard shift as a security guard for the Arkansas Highway Department. He's done that for 32 years. For almost as long, he's made 8mm films (then videotapes) solely for himself, and for the friends who constitute their casts.

Word eventually leaked out beyond the Natural State's borders, however, to reach the hairy sensitive lobes of obscurantist hipsters. Finally, Brian Gordon, Nashville Film Festival director and erstwhile programmer at the San Francisco International Film Festival – oh, the talent the latter institution has pissed away! – orchestrated Chambliss's first official "public" screening last year. Now he's picked up celebrity fans (Ethan Coen is supposedly one) and gets invites from other tony joints to represent "outsider cinema" and "regional exotica."

This weekend's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts program, "Phil Chambliss: Auteur from Arkansas," is indeed very regional, pretty damn exotic, and way outside – something or other. But he's no yokel to be laughed at. Rather, he's a yokel to be laughed along with. The three mini-movies billed aren't funny in spite of themselves; they're just very funny – as well as highly peculiar, politically incorrect, and as surreal as all get-out. They're Hee-Haw's Flying Circus meets Jim Jarmusch, a redneck absurdism so deadpan you might well mistake the laughs for gaffes. In which case, the joke's on you.

The black-and-white "Devil's Helper" (1995) has two gun-toting, overall-clad rubes up to no good on protected forest land. They plan to poach venison (represented by one jarring, repeated still photo of a stag) and maybe torch a law-abiding relative's deer-hunting stand. The Smalley Brothers are surprised to discover a ponytailed, middle-aged man sitting behind a desk in the middle of the woods. "How you two heathens doin'?" Satan's emissary hails. "I got one fer ya: How do you tell when a game warden lies? His mouth moves." The Faustian deal he offers our dim duo doesn't punish or redeem them. Indeed, backwoods evil triumphs.

The 2002 "Mr. Visit Show" is an even more bizarre construct. A crusty proprietor of a "day care center for birds" (who professes past friendship with Bill Clinton and stands accused of drugging his charges with sleeping pills) announces all poultry is "like these wimmen – they's always another one out there in the field a-gobblin'." Culminating in the lamest "martial arts" battle possible ("I got my black belt at Wal-Mart!"), pseudo-documentary "Mr. Visit" sports such further bon mots as "I'm broker than the Ten Commandments."

Pending completion of the long-delayed The Pastor and the Hobo, Chambliss's longest effort to date is Pink Christmas, a 58-minute epic designated in the credits as a 1992-93 production (and his 23rd). I've no idea what the title means. Still, the film shares kinship with both Pink Narcissus and Pink Flamingos as a masturbatory expression of delicious kitsch hilarity. What happens here? Beats me – Hellzapoppin' and Schizopolis alike similarly defied clean description. The Deluxe Barber Shop is the locus of yuletide intrigue that includes bizarre race-based exchanges, inbred Olympics, "Santy Claus" fraud, blackmail, and characters so "hillbilly" they're like Waiting for Godot au naturel. Did I mention it's a semi-musical?

Chambliss writes and plays his own synth-keyboard soundtracks, each priceless in itself. His performers are awkward-slash-inspired in ways perhaps semi-accidental to them. But surely not to the "auteur": he lets them break character, stare at the camera, and suffer moments of "Duh?" forgetfulness so often it's clear he enjoys their rough edges. The comic effect isn't mean-spirited, though. Rather, it's that of an in-joke so far inside it becomes at once inscrutable and universally funny.

The only "intelligence" Chambliss's films lack is attentiveness toward general-zeitgeist standards for art, wit, technique, and marketability. What's great about them is precisely that disregard. They're authentic, crazy – crazily authentic. They're the party we never expected (or wanted?) to be invited to. Yet being there is strangely familiar, familiarly strange. It's the cryptically hilarious heartland Americana our faux-"folksy" leaders would prefer you didn't know about.

'Phil Chambliss: Auteur from Arkansas' plays Fri/14, 7:30 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $5-$8. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org.