It’s quiet in the cold of our little orbit around the sun, starless and bible black. But if you’ve got the time to indulge in a bit of holiday sentimentality, then I would like to share the happiest Christmas memory of my childhood with you, an experience that shaped the young adult and the man I would become as much as any book or teacher ever would. I was accidentally given an inestimable gift – one which unwittingly dared me to grow intellectually and culturally so that I could be properly worthy of it, and which has since comforted me through endless long subsequent years of disappointment, heartache, personal growth, and triumph. And there’s no better time to write about it than during a season of joy. So if you will graciously permit me, on this Christmas Eve 2023 I’d like to take you back to the “not-too-distant future.”
On Christmas Eve 1991, my father suggested we should watch a cassette of an obscure TV show his friend at work had taped off a then-obscure cable channel called Comedy Central a few days before. “A guy and some robots make fun of bad movies” was how he described the premise. Since my dad and I had been talking back to films from the safety of our family-room couch for years already while watching B-movie schlock like USA Up All Night, it was at least something to do. (11-year-olds do not otherwise have a long list of entertainment options.)
Although my dad couldn’t possibly have intended it, what happened next altered the course of my life, and profoundly for the better: I was exposed to Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K for short) for the first time. And “exposed” is the right word; the experience was as instantly catalyzing a moment for me as a rapid chemical reaction. It was the Christmas episode from a few days earlier, and the show was mocking something called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, about which more later. Before I could even begin to absorb what was going on on-screen, I first had to adjust to the nuttiness of the premise.
Thankfully, this was explained for a pre-adolescent right in the opening theme song: Two mad scientists have abducted a hapless, good-natured janitor named Joel, launched him into space, and were now forcing him to watch terrible movies for their entertainment and profit. But since Joel got lonely being stranded in orbit by himself, he created a series of lovable robot companions – his children, really; the relationship is clearly a lovingly parental one – to keep him sane and suffer through the worst of it with him. (As silly as this conceit may seem, it is a haunting – and very intentional – echo of Doug Trumbull’s 1972 sci-fi cult classic Silent Running.) It wasn’t the most important backstory in the world. But it immediately set the show off in a very strange, very different place from anything else I’d yet seen: a science-fiction cowtown puppet show.
And once the show properly began after those credits, it was over for me: There those robots sat (named Gypsy, Crow, and Tom Servo, as I would soon find out), inside a ship decked out in tinsel and lights, looking at toy catalogues exactly the way my brother and I had the other night, dreaming about expensive Sharper Image novelties. (Crow: “Parents, remember: Kids always know best. So get ‘em whatever they want! Look, a $900 taffeta octopus outfit – thanks dad!”) Then our host Joel Robinson walks on, greets the audience, and asks his little robot monsters what they want for Christmas. Tom: “A Ted Williams Signature Inflatable Bathtub Pillow.” Gypsy: “I want a pony.” (Joel: “Oh Gypsy, we don’t have room on the ship for a pony.”) Finally, Crow makes his request: “I wanna decide who lives and who dies.”
Cut to commercial break.
Everyone in the room immediately collapsed in laughter. By the time the show had returned from break to demonstrate Christmas-themed inventions, I felt like the characters were speaking a strangely allusionary language of cultural references and jokes that I didn’t fully grasp but could half-translate. With childlike enthusiasm, Crow offers the world a Road House boardgame, based randomly on the ridiculous Patrick Swayze action film that was already over two years old at the time. Why focus on Road House, a schlock film I only knew from TV ads? I had no idea. But I understood the ridiculousness of the premise, and it was outrageously funny to watch a little gold robot spontaneously sing the praises of a highly-paid, Tai chi–wielding, philosophically alert bouncer. I’ll never forget how comforted MST3K made me feel from that exact moment onward, comforted that there were people out there who had my sense of humor – only they were vastly more funny than me.
As I mentioned earlier, the bad movie they were riffing on that night was the holiday anti-classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. (Warlike Martians kidnap Santa Claus in order to bring Christmas cheer to Martian child Pia Zadora – heavy-hitting stuff.) As riotously funny as the riffing was – and this at an age when I understood, charitably, maybe 55 percent of the jokes – it was secondary to the magic of seeing the Bots interact with Joel. Because the moment that forever cemented my love for MST3K came only a half-hour into the movie when (much to my surprise) the group retreated from the theater for what I would later learn was called a “host segment”: Young Crow had written a Christmas carol for the group to sing, a new seasonal classic called “Let’s Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas.” Yes, folks: Another weirdly devoted Road House joke. But the first time, it was just a inspiredly random one-off gag. Now, it was about to go down in the annals of television comedy history:
It’s my way or the highway, this Christmas at my bar
I’ll have to smash your kneecaps if you bastards touch my car.
I got the word that Santa has been stealing from the till
I think that that right jolly old elf better make out his will.
Sold, forever. I don’t even remember how long it took me to stop laughing. I only remember cracking up so hard at everything about what I was witnessing that my dad actually had to calm me down. I went to bed that Christmas Eve with a song in my heart – unfortunately, I remember it being “Hooray for Santy Claus!” and not “A Patrick Swayze Christmas” – as well as a feeling that I do remember with crystal clarity even now because of its uniqueness: pure unadulterated joy. I think I got a Super Nintendo the next day, which was nice, admittedly. But I had already received the gift of a lifetime. I let my brother take first dibs on Super Mario World that morning while I put on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians again. And again.
* * *
What was this miraculous thing I had discovered? Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a show based nominally around riffing on cheesy movies. But that is only one facet of its appeal, and not necessarily the most important one, though the one most easily imitated by countless others since. What has proven impossible to imitate over time is its core comedic sensibility, a collective vibe created by a writer’s room of some of the most talented and widely cultured comedy writers in the Twin Cities region (well, not St. Paul – St. Paul is a blasted heath). Lots of people can riff on bad films. Nobody ever felt like Joel or Mike and the Bots while doing so.
To understand the origin of MST3K’s humor and gentle, yet stingingly funny, tone during those early years is to understand that the show was the collective product of proud and eccentric upper Midwesterners who were happy being Midwesterners. Creator Joel Hodgson was born and raised in northern Wisconsin. After initially heading to Los Angeles to seek fame, he returned in disgust to set up shop in Minneapolis in 1985. All the other members of the original core writing staff – Jim Mallon, Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, Kevin Murphy, and Mike Nelson – hailed from either Minnesota, Wisconsin, or northern Illinois. (Beloved later addition Frank Conniff, originally from New York, found his way to the Twin Cities comedy scene after his parents sent him to rehab in Minneapolis in 1986; there are many hilarious “rehab culture” jokes on the show and it’s a safe bet who wrote them.) When TV executives tried to cajol the group – incorporated under the name “Best Brains, Inc.” – to move to New York or Los Angeles, they emphatically refused. Instead, the quiet suburb of Eden Prairie outside Minneapolis became their own version of Prince’s Chanhassen: a place where they could work away from prying eyes and coastal expectations and executives.
And so, with the writers left to their own devices, the show’s style grew organically at a sprint-like pace over its first three seasons. The writers at BBI took to cultivating the idea of “riffing” into an art. The joy of any MST3K episode from this era was how the jokes came from so many different angles that they obliterated the distinction between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow alike. References to Modigliani, Wagner, and Pynchon sat easily alongside references to long-forgotten ’70s TV cop shows and fart jokes alike. It was the ease with which they all flowed together that made it wonderfully strange. The combined comic eccentricities of the show’s writers and the acting/puppeteering imbued specific character into both Joel and his robot friends. (At one point Tom Servo – who can do a killer Buckley impression – is casually revealed to have a subscription to National Review, and why not? Given that little red gumball machine’s arty aspirations, it made all the sense in the world.)
MST3K was my impression, as a Washington, D.C.,-area kid, of a “true Midwestern comedic sensibility” – less hurried and hectoring, with a slyness to its intellectualism that never needs to insist upon itself. Instead, I was the one who felt I had work to do. I needed to chase down those references. I wanted to know what it was I might be missing. (My massive fund of pre-Nineties American pop-cultural knowledge is directly traceable to my obsession with this show.) I grew to admire and identify with that style and sensibility so much that I aspired to imitate it. As it turns out, I simply write and make jokes in a different (less successful) way. Yet perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that I moved to Chicago at the age of 25 and, save for a few years spent – tellingly – in Wisconsin and Minneapolis, have never left.
* * *
Mystery Science Theater 3000 aired the last episode of its original run in 1999. I had more or less every one of them memorized by then, my sophomore year of college. I own every episode on DVD (including the ones not officially available on DVD – keep circulating the tapes). A quarter-century later, it remains my favorite television show of all time — how could it not? It was a once-in-a-lifetime alchemical moment for me, personally: I discovered the perfect show at the exact perfect moment, when all of the references the cast was making to old ’70s and ’80s pop culture were still fairly well-remembered for an alert and intellectually osmotic kid watching midday re-runs, while current references were simply understood as part of our shared culture of the early ’90s. It makes me sad to realize that an 11-year-old who sat down to watch MST3K for the first time in 2023 would likely get far less out of it, simply because there is no equivalent shared context the way there was for the young me. Maybe you really did have to be there.
But I was. And it changed my life. It’s downright fascinating to me to excavate my own lexicon of jokes or daily references – the sorts of things I’ll say to my wife, or my son, or even just at the store to a cashier – and find that it’s essentially a giant latticework of random MST3K allusions. No other show, no other comedian in my life, played as fundamental a role in shaping my private worldview. Norm Macdonald perhaps crystallized it for me as a teenager. But by that time I’d been going to school on MST3K’s style for years. So I know what I’ll be doing again this Christmas Eve: The same thing I’ve done for 30 years now, first with dad and mom (R.I.P.), sometimes alone, and now with my wife: I’ll be settling in to watch Santa kick some serious Martian butt and save Christmas for all the little green children, with some people who cannot help but feel like old friends at this point. Let’s all have a Patrick Swayze Christmas this year, folks, and maybe, just maybe, this can be the haziest, laziest, Swayziest Christmas of them all.