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There is a phrase in writing: Kill your darlings. In essence it is a call to brevity and to honest editing. Sometimes you have to get rid of a line you like for the sake of the piece. You don’t want to overstay your welcome. This is particularly important when it comes to comedy. It has been on my mind recently while having old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on in the background, because Joel really seemed to have an issue with killing his darlings.
A comedic trope found in the Joel era that is much less common in the Mike era is list-based comedy. Joel and the ‘bots would be on a topic and they would just list things…and list things…and list things. As you might deduce from how I framed that, it can be a chore. That’s especially due to the fact it’s not just the length of the sketches, but the quality of the jokes.
The show would have been wise to take a list of, say, 15 jokes and pare it does to the five best. Do those five jokes, and let that be it. If you want to give Joel, Crow, and Tom an equal number of bits, do six of them. That’s enough for list-based comedy, and if they are all, say, at least a B+, that’s fine with me.
On MST3K, though, the feeling was more of casting a wide net and hoping to catch something. The hope, perhaps, that out of nine or 10 jokes the viewer might like two or three of them. Of course, if that is the case, that leaves seven or eight jokes that don’t land. And you have to sit through them all, and you can sense the fact they are just rattling off a list of jokes they had written for the occasion. It feels like Joel and company think that seven C+ jokes provide just as much entertainment as four B+ jokes. Sure, perhaps in terms of sheer tonnage, but not on a per capita basis, and that is how the viewer experiences it.
Given Joel’s professional experience with standup, you would have thought he’d have a better sense of delivering good material and not overstaying your welcome. If he ever did, that did not port over to Mystery Science Theater 3000.
