Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History
by Matt Foy & Christopher J. Olson (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers)
This book is about Mystery Science Theater 3000 (heretofore MST3K), the 90’s television show that invented modern culture.1 The book is a history of the show’s production, up to the failed crowdfunding in ’23, a discussion of the show’s fiction, and a critical analysis of the show’s function: how it does what it does and why it works. This is not the first critical look at MST3K, but it is the most affordable.
The book has problems, but it accomplishes what it intends to do. It is a general, well-rounded history of MST3K, including the new seasons. It creates a taxonomy of the jokes (heretofore riffs) of the program, categorizing them by form and function, and thinking about their meanings and what sort of humor they are. It looks to explain the show’s history in relation to the authors’ theory of the show’s methods, and the ways in which that is distinctive to the show or as part of comedy as a whole.
There are two problems with the book, one major and one minor.
The minor problem is the structure. Blending together the history and the crit produces few insightful juxtapositions and is moderately distracting. It has the result of giving insufficient attention to the recent seasons,2 or distancing the analysis of them in a way that is at least unfair to them and frustrates the authors’ thesis of something that we can talk about as a MST3K riff.
The major problem is that I do not think that the authors understand comedy.
I do not mean that the authors are not funny. With a few exceptions in the end notes, they are not making jokes. This is fine.
I do not mean Hodgson’s Law. It is valid to question how any given riff works, or how they fit together as a sort of message about the world.
I might mean how the authors use ‘problematic’ in an idiosyncratic way, even with an invocation to Merriam-Webster.3
Comedy is subjective, and in reviewing a book, I try to skew towards the coherence of the argument rather than my agreement with the argument, but a lot of the interpretations here are weird. The book identifies correct readings to the corpus of riffs, then picks out examples that do not support it.
I think that a book like this needs performers, or at least cultural critics with a focus on comedy. Like when the book discusses the leveling effect of the jokes, there is no discussion of this type of joke elsewhere. Specifically in terms of referential humor the authors assert MST3K as being unique, but do no work with that other material to show the difference.4 And while MST3K was conscientious about the targets of its jokes – woke before it was cool – it is clearly a case of what targets are acceptable, which is different than the authors’ even Homer nodded view. And while more conscientious interpolaters are mentioned, some discussion ought to go to the more negative ones.
The appendix is a list of essential episodes. With the amount of detail put on the jokes in the body of the text5 it feels like this is the book that the authors wanted to write. Like if the history was summarized and observations about the jokes mixed with this ‘best of,’ it would be an insightful guide. Instead it ends up a book trying to do both too many things and not enough.
My thanks to the authors, Christopher J. Olson and Matt Foy, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, for making the ARC available to me.6
- The authors hedge on this, but I will not. MST3K is The Pixies of the modern post-binge media landscape. You can talk about who did it before them, or who did it better than them, but in a simple genealogical sense all the visual and aural media that I consume comes out of this spot.
However, limited research suggest that the ‘video joker’ mentioned late in the book is a separate phenomenon. And great, now I want to find the book on international metatext. ↩︎ - I’ll say it if no one else will: if they’d led with Emily, the show would still be on Netflix. ↩︎
- I do not know that it is a wrong usage. Part of the problem, as the dictionary definition attests, is the semantic drift over the word’s use. ↩︎
- And no, a one-off Family Guy dis does not count. That is a cutaway gag. Now do Futurama. ↩︎
- This sometimes feels like That Guy at a party telling you the punchlines out of his favorite movie, but needs must. ↩︎
- Also, my thanks to everyone who circulated the tapes. I did not like MST3K when I first encountered it, but I am glad that people did see what I did not, and kept it alive for me to understand, finally, why it was so good. ↩︎
CITATION HEEDED 