Joshua English Scrimshaw says he is good at comedy because he was bad at sports.

Comic performer Scrimshaw — who is presenting a live radio show, “The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society,” for Halloween — says he’s not alone in the way he discovered his gift for making people laugh.

“It’s the old cliche of not being adept at sports. I would miss catching balls, fall down when I wasn’t supposed to. Then, I started playing it off for the laughs that accompanied it and thinking, ‘Hey, this is actually better than catching the ball,’ ” Scrimshaw says. “I think that’s one of my earliest memories of taking something that could have been negative and making it positive.”

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Theatre 55 presents original radio play series Scrimshaw has become so successful at eliciting laughs, from a variety of different platforms, that his name (and that of his brother, Joseph, with whom he often performs) is a brand that fans of live comedy follow. A regular at the Fringe Festival, he also performs with Comedy Suitcase (which he founded with Levi Weinhagen with the first of several comic takes on “The Hardy Boys”), teams up with wife Adrienne English to produce English Scrimshaw Theatrical Novelties and is partnering with playwright Tim Uren’s Ghoulish Delights on a series of podcasts that present classic radio dramas, followed by discussions that add historical context and commentary.

A live version of two of those classics, a “horrific” episode of “The Shadow” and a tale of suspense from right after World War II, will be on stage this weekend as “The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society,” which will feature Scrimshaw as well as Shanan Custer and Eric Webster.

“We’re going to try to re-create a live radio broadcast, using those old scripts,” Scrimshaw says. “We’ll let people see how they used to do it, with the sound effects and we’ll have Joe Weisman of the Jaztronauts doing keyboard accompaniment — for the melodramatic strings and all of that.”

Scrimshaw, who is in his 40s and grew up in Portland and Minneapolis, thinks the time is right to convert podcast fans into old-time radio fans. He has been on board that bus since he was a kid whose parents let him listen to old radio theater because it was the only way they could get him to go to bed.

“In the late ’70s, there was sort of a radio nostalgia, as I remember it. I would see tapes in grocery stores, in the impulse-buy racks, of ‘The Green Hornet’ and ‘The Shadow’ and I remember begging my parents for them,” says Scrimshaw, who added “Star Wars” radio dramas to his collection in the 1980s.

The hope for the live show and podcasts is to build a new audience for old radio, an audience that will enjoy radio the way Scrimshaw has for more than three decades.

“When Levi and I originally got together to write an adult, parody kind of spoof of ‘The Hardy Boys,’ the more we thought about it, the more we realized that we had such childhood fondness for it that we wanted to stay true to that. We worried a little that an all-ages spoof would be a detriment to the show’s possibilities, but it turned out to be something that people really responded to,” Scrimshaw says.

He describes that as an “aha moment” that has helped steer him to work that, like “Mysterious Radio Hour,” reaches across generations. As his answers to our 10 questions reveal, it’s an ethos that’s at least partly inspired by his own family, which includes a 12-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son:

Q: Where is your favorite place to be?

A: Home, because I don’t get there often enough. I have two kids and a day job and theatrical endeavors and getting everyone home and watch something together is not as common as I’d like.

Q: What would you do if you had a million dollars?

A: I’m flashing back to 1954 and thinking, “Buy a theater,” the poor (demolished) Terrace Theatre, but a million is not going to do that. It’s like that old Austin Powers joke of holding the country for ransom for “one million dollars.” It wouldn’t buy a theater. Maybe a small one?

Q: What is the scariest thing you’ve ever done?

A: Some work with Jim Snapko, who’s a local filmmaker. It was going to be some dumb thing where my character jumped into a lake. We ended up filming in October and I was not prepared for how cold it was. I almost drowned — I was fully clothed and I started going under. Also, I was doing a video shoot years ago with Bedlam Theater, filming a fake robbery, and they didn’t think to inform the police department. So they’re doing take after take in front of this little antique store and the St. Paul police show up, guns drawn, thinking it was an actual robbery.

Q: When did you know you wanted to be a performer?

A: At (Minneapolis) North High School, part of our creative writing magnet program. That’s where I started writing a lot of comedy short stories and I realized I enjoyed reading the stories to people far more than letting them go away and read them and come back to tell me what they thought. You don’t really know if you’ve made them laugh. Publishing misses that last step for me, particularly when it’s comic.

Q: What is the best thing about your job?

A: Everyone thinks of these funny ideas but not everybody gets to do them. It’s the magic of thinking, “Hey, I’m going to do a show about Tesla and Edison and people will come to see it!” It’s this amazing transformation from a dumb idea to a tangible thing.

Q: What are you thinking about when you’re about to go on?

A: I don’t have a lot of stage fright. It’s, “Let’s go. Let’s do this!” I think you have a 10- to 15-minute window in comedy to get the audience on your side, so I’m usually just ready to start big and figure out who the audience is.

Q: What was your first job?

A: Dairy Queen in North Minneapolis. It’s a pizza place now, right on the border of Robbinsdale and Minneapolis.

Q: Who would play you in a movie?

A: I would hope me. Or I think I would want a complete unknown, if I had to pick someone.

Q: What is your motto?

A: I should get one. My daughter comes up with mottoes for herself a lot. One in my head that is one of her favorites is, “Don’t be dumb. It’s stupid.” She’s 12.

Q: Whom do you most admire?

A: I admire strangers a lot. When you see someone you don’t know, you don’t know their context, who is handling a situation better than you would. I work in a grocery store and I see people having far more patience with their children than I do.

IF YOU GO

What: “The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society”

When: Oct. 28-30

Where: Bryant Lake Bowl, 810 W. Lake St., Mpls.

Tickets: $15-$6, 612-825‑8949 or bryantlakebowl.com