Joe Don Baker and Basquiat: MST3K, riff culture and the internet

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was, and is, a show whose success (even as a cult hit) was curious. Essentially, the entire show consisted of three dorks watching a terrible movie and making fun of it ("riffing") - That two of the dorks in question were puppet robots, and that the show itself was set on a space station were mere set dressing. It recreated a common scene in reality, one which was similarly recreated by Beavis and Butthead: People willingly submitting themselves to "bad", disposable popular culture for the opportunities it offered for comedy. But while Beavis and Butthead used caricatures of the lowest common denominator, characters that the viewing audience could feel superior to even as they laughed with them, MST3K's writers went out of their way to seek out the obscure and the erudite. The Wikiquote page for the show is studded with references to other wikipedia pages.
 
There's a point in the MST3K episode "Blood Waters of Doctor Z"¹ when a chunky white sheriff and a skinny black scientist are referred to as "Joe Don Baker and Basquiat, just hangin' out". To get the joke requires both a knowledge of high art and the lowest culture (the latter being helped by previous MST3K episodes starring Baker). The comedy inherent in making highbrow literary references to mock utterly disposable bargain-basement movies was a frequent go-to: When a scene in a swamp is overdubbed with frog noises, the riff "Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!" is hilarious if you know the play to which it refers, otherwise it's baffling nonsense. This was fine by the audience, composed of those who would either get a joke or be willing to accept it as funny given context (Annoyance at not getting the joke may have been softened by the riff density - as pointed out by the creators, the show involved something along the lines of eight jokes a minute in its latter seasons. If you don't get one, there's another to fall back on). Compare that with other media which avoided - and which, in many cases, still avoid - making any reference the audience can't be expected to understand. And, as in the case of David Mitchell² in the last link, a typical viewer faced with a joke they didn't understand would seek out the context and learn.

MST3K is remembered fondly (and maintained in "digital archive" form) because it described a certain culture which would later find full fruition on the internet, one in which it was not merely accepted but expected that terrible pop culture ephemera should be mocked to its face. Call it riff culture or comment culture, for good or ill it expanded into a general idea that all media deserved to be talked back to. The show itself later underwent a Superman-esque multiple rebirth as The Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic and most successfully Rifftrax³, but now that very Youtube comment page serves a similar function⁴, there seems to be little point.

1. If the internet is to be believed, BWoDZ was created when the director found some footage for a scrapped opening to "The Incredible Mister Limpet" and decided to build an entire film around it. 
2. The David Mitchell's Soapbox ads are an ideal example of post-modern advertising, being essentially comic monologues with no obvious connection to the product. Bulldog even demonstrates its own down-with-the-kids authenticity by having Mitchell decry the very notion of male grooming.
3. Rifftrax's success is arguably down to the "understanding" it has with its fans and DVD distributors. The audio tracks of Rifftrax commentaries are sold to be "synced up" with the DVD of the film, thus sparing the creators the cost of paying for the necessary rights which MST3K and the other successor projects had. In actual practice, the audio commentary is more or less immediately synced to a pirated version of the film's video and the combined version offered on a P2P site - The site itself accepts donations no questions asked, allowing them to, through a bizarre version of the honour system, profit from piracy.
4. Or would, if Youtube comments weren't nigh-universally terrible. Here we see the defnite advantage of having a team of capable writers covering the task of riffing.