I owe a lot to Mystery Science Theater 3000. In all honesty I owe my job to that show. I didn’t realize it at the time, but every episode of MST3K I saw as a kid was teaching me how to be funny. From Joel, Mike, Crow and Tom Servo’s example I learned how to find the common threads in totally unrelated things and exploit them for comedy. I learned how to index, search and retrieve references and how to find the one glimmer of humor in a seemingly humorless situation (or film, in their case). They taught me less about “making jokes” and more about learning how to look at situations to see why they are already funny, or the find the missing piece that would make them funny. I use those lessons every single day and I am grateful that there was such a resource available to me. Considering none of that was even remotely funny, perhaps I have forgotten all I learned. Oh well.
I was lucky enough to get to hang out with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett at SDCC last year and tell them just how much of an impact they had on my comedic upbringing. If you haven’t spent a great deal of time with Joel, Mike and the bots, I strongly suggest you stream the available episodes of MST3K on Netflix and FOR THE LOVE OF SPACE CHIEF you have to check out Rifftrax. The very fact that their commentary made both Eragon and Twilight not only endurable but enjoyable should be enough to convince you to give them your delicious monies in exchange for their electronic laugh-time files.
COMMENTERS: Please insert The Doctor into your favorite MST‘d movie. Give me the title and the key scenes. Perhaps in Pod People he could give Trumpy the choice to end his terrible reign of “making things float” and “doing stupid things” in exchange for helping him get back to his own planet. Of course in the end, when Trumpy doesn’t aquiesce, The Doctor would have to destroy him. Maybe The Doctor could team up with Rowsdower in The Final Sacrifice and stop all those… Canadians from… doing whatever they were trying to do. I’m still not sure about that one. ROWSDOWER!
100,000 bonus points to anyone that rewrites the MST3K theme song (any version) to be about The Doctor. I KNOW one of you can do it.
UPDATE 2:
BIG ASS 11×17 PRINTS ARE IN THE HIJINKS ENSUE PRINT SHOP!
UPDATE: Today’s comic has been desktopified and wallpaper-o-tronned for your amusement and downloadification. All HijiNKS Ensue wallpapers are now available on a “Pay what you like” donation basis. Please consider donating to support HijiNKS Ensue.
TO CURRENT VAULT SUBSCRIBERS: I am currently reworking the Vault and the incentives for donations. I have some really fun stuff to announce, hopefully later this month (January 2012).
