If you’re going to be in or around San Diego this weekend for the Comic Con, you may also want to check out RiffTrax Live in San Diego!

The Riffers for the event will be Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, and Mike Nelson and they’ll be riffing along to cult classic Plan 9 From Outer Space. There’ll be two showings on Saturday, July 26: one at 7pm and another at 9:30pm.

I interviewed Mike Nelson about RiffTrax and he was especially enthusiastic about the live shows.

“We’ve done some live shows in the old MST3K days and they were always such great fun and that was what gave us the idea to do the feature film years ago in the first place,” Nelson says. “It’s that infectiousness of doing it live. So you get to see the cumulative effect of these jokes that we work so hard on. Sharing them with someone else is so much better … We’ve done a few already, a number of them in San Francisco and this will be the first time we’re doing one in San Diego, which is where I live now.”

For those not familiar with RiffTrax, the concept is quite simple. The Riffers provide hilarious comedic commentary tracks to well-known movies. You download a commentary track from rifftrax.com, sync it up with a movie, and presto! It’s like having instant funny company who wisecrack to movies.

For Nelson and the rest of the Riffers, their brand of commentary is now second nature thanks to years of professional experience talking over movies (just imagine being able to put that on your resumé!). “We’ve done enough of them to learn that there’s not a lot of movies that are just totally off limits or undoable because there’s always a way in,” Nelson explains. “Well, not always, but for the most part there is.”

Do you see a movie you like on the RiffTrax site and are outraged by it? Are you shaking your fist while thinking to yourself, “How dare they make fun of my favorite movie?” Well stop it! It’s nothing personal.

“When we pick a movie, it doesn’t mean ‘Oh, this is a piece of crap. Let’s trash all over it.’ It’s really just a different way of doing comedy, of sort of riding on top of this other experience,” Nelson says. “Sometimes you’re putting words in the mouths of characters, sometimes you’re observing things, and sometimes it’s the three of us having fun outside of it. So there’s a lot of different ways to go about it rather than just saying, ‘Oh isn’t this a stupid movie? Look at that dumb guy!’ It doesn’t work that way 99 percent of the time.”

Whether you’re familiar with RiffTrax or not, I can guarantee that RiffTrax Live will be an unforgettable and unique comedy experience. If you’re a fan and you’ll be in the area, you really have no excuse for not going. In fact, why aren’t you in line for this right now? It’s only two days away. Don’t you comic and sci-fi geeks love standing in lines? You might even get to meet the Riffers!

“We’ll be there at the Comic Con so you can come up and say ‘Hi,’” Nelson says. “I always like meeting the fans and the people who’ve travelled far so come stop by.”

LINK: RiffTrax Live in San Diego!