Though one of the masterminds behind that famous "cowtown puppet show" has moved out west, we learned he's still ever the sweet Midwestern guy.

You are originally from the Midwest, but you've lived in San Diego for two years now. Do you enjoy living there?
Yeah, I'm liking it. There's things about Minnesota that I miss. The bone-chilling cold is not one of them, but I had a lot of friends there. But I like San Diego a lot.

Do you return to the Midwest pretty often?
Yeah, I usually make it once a year, back home. For someone who is unfamiliar with your work, how do you explain what you do for a living?
Boy, as someone who's tried to explain a hundred times, I'm still trying to come up with the one sentence answer, and I have not yet cracked that. You know, if was born in the '20s, I would say I'm a humorist and everyone would go, "Ahh, I've probably read your stuff." But it takes a lot more explanation now. You know, it's just, I'm a comic who's worked in a lot of different mediums; I guess that's what it is. And the "talking back to movies" seems to be the one I'm stuck on.

Can you walk us through a typical day at Rifftrax HQ?
First you get all coffee-d up, that's highly important. And then, you know, mostly the writing is by far the longest thing. That process is just, we've come up with the term "grinding." You're sitting with this movie, and you recognize that it needs a joke in a certain place, and then it's that sifting through the hundreds of things that could go in there. It's just incredibly time consuming. So most days I am writing, and I'll write at the office, I'll be instant messaging other writers about certain things, "Did you make this Three Stooges joke?" whatever, and try to make sure we don't cover too much of the same ground. And then I do a lot of writing at home as well. So it's just many hours of that.

And once those cycles are done, then the fun begins, and Kevin and Bill will fly out and we'll do a rehearsal, which is a little more fun, and then the reward is when we actually get to go in the studio and all the problems have been solved, and just perform the script. So that's it in a nutshell.

What genre of movies do you think lends itself best to the riffing experience?
Well, I think, boy you know we hit these genres all the time because of this, but Sci-fi and the sort of comic book movies to some extent, when they take themselves seriously, or they put something forward, if you actually think about Spider-man or any of those things, what they're asking you to believe in a movie is pretty hard to swallow. Which works differently obviously in a comic book. It's a different medium, so your expectations are different. So those are easy. Also I'm a big fan of the 80s action movies because those ask you to believe absurd things, like that Sylvester Stallone can speak, and that Patrick Swayze is a world famous bouncer, so you've got all those things.

Are you saying that's not a valid career?
Well, I'm sure there are people who do it, but whether or not they're world famous bouncers, that's where it gets tough. So anything where the movie takes itself fairly seriously works really well. And that's also why I think shorts from the past, those are easy to - well, I don't want to say "easy," but they're easy for people to understand our point of view on. But if those elements aren't there, it's also not a disaster, because there's sort of a meta-commentary that you're doing that's providing a running humorous commentary. There's that dry word "humorous," but comedy should be endlessly inventive, there are lots of ways to crack certain movies. That's my long answer. I went down a lot of rabbit holes.

On a side note, people are so happy the shorts are back.
We love doing them so I think those will always be a part of it.

The newest one, "One Got Fat," is absolutely terrifying.
Is that not the biggest nightmare you've ever seen?

I actually felt bad. I read on Prelinger's site, the archive site [www.archive.org], there were comments on there, and there was about 10 or 12 people confessing that they had seen this as a child and were traumatized. And they were so happy that it was back up because they actually sort of forced it away with the will of a child, and they thought they were insane, and I actually got kind of sad reading them, like "this is sort of heart ramming, people are actually traumatized." So it's good to bring it out into the full light of day and have it give people a chance to get their emotions worked out.

You mentioned 80s movies. When you riff solo, you tend to use the older ones, and when it's you, Bill and Kevin, you tend to go newer and bigger. Is there a reason for that?
Well, frankly the niche ones from the 80s are things that I really enjoy, and those aren't big powerhouse sellers, for one thing, so not as many people obviously enjoy them as I do. So they are a little bit of a throwaway to build the catalog and to give those few people who are like me some joy, but most people tend to like the bigger ones, the ones that they have a chance of just pulling down from their shelf and throwing in the DVD player. But I think we'll continue to reach into the past every now and then because I do like the variation of styles and themes and decades and everything.

Do you consider anything off-limits in your riffing? Are there any titles you wouldn't use, or any aspects that would prevent you from riffing?
For the most part, things that are just distasteful to me, I just don't like. If you have a chance to comment on them and they're not too bad, I don't have a problem with them, but some stuff is just outside the bounds of taste to begin with, so to even put it out again is probably not a good idea. That said, there may be sort of classic movies that it would be fun to have a commentary on, like I've always thought The Godfather movies would be fun to have a go at. It doesn't mean the movies are bad or anything, but they're just so familiar, and they're film archetypes, and I think movies like that could be done.

There's a wide variety of stuff that we've done, I think it just has to do with availability, and if we can make the source material widely available through downloads or whatever, I don't think there's anything totally off-limits. Again, except for things we're obviously never going to touch. Schindler's List.

Passion of the Christ probably wouldn't work.
Yeah, it's not gonna work, it's not appropriate, but there's not like any sacred cows, where, "Oh, that's too good." Would we ever do It's a Wonderful Life? Maybe, who knows?