Is It Rude to Talk Over a Film? MST3K’s Mary Jo Pehl on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #45

We live in a com­men­tary cul­ture with much appre­ci­a­tion for camp and snark, but some­thing spe­cial hap­pened in the ear­ly ’90s when Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 pop­u­lar­ized this addi­tive form of com­e­dy, where jokes are made dur­ing a full-length or short film. Mary Jo Pehl was a writer and per­former on MST3K and has since riffed with fel­low MST3K alums for Riff­trax and Cin­e­mat­ic Titan­ic.

Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an briefly debate the ethics of talk­ing over some­one else’s art and then inter­view Mary Jo about how riffs get writ­ten, devel­op­ing a riff­ing style and a char­ac­ter that the audi­ence can con­nect with (do you need to include skits to estab­lish a premise for why riff­ing is hap­pen­ing?), riff­ing films you love vs. old garbage, the degree to which riff­ing has gone beyond just MST3K-asso­ci­at­ed come­di­ans, VH-1’s Pop-Up Video, and more.

Fol­low Mary Jo @MaryJoPehl.

Here are a some links to get you watch­ing riff­ing:

• For MST3K new­bies, you might want to watch some episodes, near­ly all of which are on YouTube. The AV Club has rec­om­mend­ed its top ten episodes. Mark thinks a great intro­duc­tion to the show (from a late sea­son that fea­tures Mary Jo as a reg­u­lar cast mem­ber) is S10E03 riff­ing a rare con­tem­po­rary film, 1996’s Mer­lin’s Shop of Mys­ti­cal Won­ders. For a clas­sic (i.e. fea­tur­ing orig­i­nal host and cre­ator Joel Hodg­son) episode, S03E03’s Pod Peo­ple is much beloved.
• Watch sam­ples of Brid­get and Mary Jo riff­ing the block­buster Grav­i­ty, Mary Jo with Riff­trax founder (and for­mer MST3K host) Mike Nel­son riff­ing Mari­ah Carey’s Glit­ter, the two of them doing a full short at a Riff­trax Live event, and with Cin­e­mat­ic Titan­ic Live tak­ing on Rat­tlers.

Dif­fer­ent teams have dif­fer­ent styles of riff­ing, so if you hate MST3K, you might want to see if you just hate those guys or hate the art form as a whole. The alums them­selves cur­rent­ly work as:

• Riff­trax (Mike Nel­son, Kevin Mur­phy, and Bill Cor­bett, who were the stars of the final MST3K sea­sons, but the new effort involves dif­fer­ent writ­ers. They riff both old B‑movies and Hol­ly­wood block­busters like Twi­light.
• Riff­trax Presents includes Brid­get and Mary Jo (who among oth­er things, are able to effec­tive­ly treat shorts and films that aim to dis­cuss “wom­en’s issues”) as well as the very British Matthew J. Elliot and Ian Pot­ter, Janet Var­ney and Cole Strat­ton, and Riff­trax writ­ers Conor Las­towka and Sean Thoma­son.
• Joel Hodg­son owns MST3K and recent­ly did his final tour as a rif­fer, though that entire­ly new group will con­tin­ue per­form­ing with­out him and just issued the Live Social Dis­tanc­ing Riff-Along Spe­cial. Joel led from behind the scenes the recent Net­flix MST3K revival with host Jon­ah Rey.
• Frank Coniff and Trace Beaulieu (who par­tic­i­pat­ed with Mary Jo and Joel in Cin­e­mat­ic Titan­ic) tour as “The Mads,” which does­n’t seem to have any clips post­ed, but you can hear their pod­cast Movie Sign with the Mads.
• Groups influ­enced by MST3K that Mark checked out include Mas­ter Pan­cake The­ater, Ran­goon Riffs, The Guy with Glass­es, Linkara, Snob Riffs, and The Last Angry Geek. Riff­trax allows groups like these to cre­ate and sell their own riffs.

Here are a few rel­e­vant arti­cles:

• “ ‘Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000’ at 30: How a Cult TV Show Changed Pop Cul­ture” by Noel Mur­ray
• “Col­or Com­men­tary” by Tad Friend
• “ ‘Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000’ Returns with New Blood for the Turkey Day Marathon” by Mered­ith Woern­er

Also, PROJECT: RIFF is the website/database we talk about where a guy named Andrew fig­ured out how many riffs per minute are in each MST3K episode, which char­ac­ter made the joke, and oth­er stuff.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.