JONAH RAY We collaborate with these movies: We enjoy them and celebrate them in the best way we know how, which is to make jokes. That’s what I do in my everyday life. So I tell people: “We’re going to get together, watch a movie, and have a party while we’re doing it.”

JOEL HODGSON Until video games, movies felt like the biggest thing in the world. So we had to be in awe of them: “Don’t do anything to the movies, we need them, keep them intact, please!” What originally motivated me to do “Mystery Science Theater 3000” was my impulse to respond: “Oh, you can talk back to these things.”

How do the best jokes get chosen?

HODGSON I feel like the best way to run a writers’ room is to have sessions where you create as much material as possible, and then hold off discussing what we came up with until another time. You’re not creating and curating at the same time: creating inhibits curating, and curating inhibits your creativity. I know it’s very popular in L.A. to have a “Fight Club”-style atmosphere in writers’ rooms, where you have a top guy who yells at the writers something like: “Come on, feed me jokes! I’m in a bad mood, make me laugh!” But we don’t do it that way, and our show proves that our method works.

How do you divvy up jokes between Jonah and the actors who play Tom and Crow?

RAY Sometimes, when we’re recording the riffs, we’ll do a pass on one section of jokes. And at the end of the section, we’ll go: “I don’t know, I don’t feel like I’m nailing this line so much. Maybe it’s funnier coming from Crow?” Or: “This is a sing-songy thing, what if it’s a Tom Servo line?” Like last season, when Baron was struggling to do a Morgan Freeman impression, we tried it with Hampton instead. Hampton then does a spot-on Morgan Freeman. So we figured: “OK, Hampton does the Morgan Freeman line.” I remember Baron saying, “That doesn’t make me feel good at all!” But Baron does a better David Bowie impression, so if we have a Bowie joke, we’ll hand it over to Baron.