Your Uncle at Thanksgiving Is a Film Critic Now: The Quiet Revolution of Riffing
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Somewhere in America right now, a person is watching a 1950s monster movie alone, and when the monster walks off-frame and clearly bumps into the wall, that person says, out loud, to nobody, "He's fine, he does his own stunts." That person is a film critic. They may not know it. They don't have a column or a podcast or a Letterboxd account. But they are performing the single most honest act of film criticism our culture has produced.
We have Mystery Science Theater 3000 to thank for that.
The Puppet Show That Taught America to Talk Back
When MST3K premiered on Minneapolis public access in 1988, the premise was a joke: a guy and some robots trapped in space, forced to watch terrible movies. But the function was something deeper. For ten seasons and a subsequent Netflix revival, the show modeled a very specific relationship with cinema — one where engagement and mockery are not opposites. Joel, Mike, and the bots never looked away. They watched every frame. They noticed the boom operator. They remembered that the villain from twenty minutes ago was now playing the mayor.
That's not laziness. That's close reading.
Contrast this with the traditional review, which often functions as a consumer advisory: is the movie good, should you spend money on it, does it pass. The riff is something else entirely. The riff is a viewer meeting the movie as an equal, in real time, with nothing at stake. Nobody riffs a movie they haven't paid attention to. Bad-faith mockery requires you to check out; riffing requires you to check in, hard.
RiffTrax and the Franchise-ication ofheckling
When MST3K ended, the riffs didn't. Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy built RiffTrax into a going concern — commentary tracks for blockbusters, downloadable riffs, and, crucially, live theatrical events beamed into multiplexes nationwide. There's something wonderfully backwards about thousands of Americans paying ticket prices to watch a terrible movie in a theater, together, laughing on purpose. It's the anti-premiere. It's the midnight screening economy's rowdy cousin.
And the live riffing scene has mushroomed far beyond the RiffTrax brand. Local troupes perform live riffings of public domain horror films in brewpubs from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. College film societies run riff nights. There's a competitive riffing circuit, which sounds like a joke and is entirely real. The tradition has become folk art — a form of communal viewing that predates streaming's atomized solitude and, arguably, answers it.
The Case for the Heckle
Here's my thesis, stated plainly: affectionate riffing is a purer form of film criticism than most professional reviews, for three reasons.
First, it's honest about its subjectivity. A riff never pretends to be the objective verdict. It's one voice, one room, one response. Second, it's evidence-based. You cannot riff what you haven't watched, and the best riffs are hyper-specific — they cite the boom mic, the mismatched day-for-night shots, the actor clearly reading cue cards. Third, and most importantly, riffing is criticism that doesn't take itself more seriously than the movie does. The makers of "Manos: The Hands of Fate" were not crafting art; responding with a dissertation would be a category error. Responding with a joke is accurate.
Critics have long worried that riffing is mean-spirited, that it teaches contempt. I'd argue the opposite. The MST3K tradition is fundamentally generous — it assumes the bad movie deserves attention, not dismissal. Nobody riffs movies nobody's heard of. Riffing is, in its weird way, a preservation movement. Half the films the show covered would be lost to time if not for a puppet and two silhouettes refusing to stop watching.
The Silence of the Theater Is Over
The next time someone laments that audiences won't sit quietly and receive cinema as art, remember: America has never been quieter than it is right now, alone with its streaming queues. The riffers are the resistance. They watch together, they talk back, they remember the boom mic.
Your uncle at Thanksgiving, yelling at the TV during a creature feature, is participating in a national tradition of communal criticism as old as the vaudeville heckle and as current as last night's RiffTrax livestream. He doesn't have a byline. He doesn't need one. He has a room full of people, a terrible movie, and the courage to say what everyone's thinking.
That's criticism. The rest is just formatting.
