People who have long dreamed about writing for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and its offshoots might be too sensitive to learn that Rifftrax writer Conor Lastowka really didn’t know much about MST3K before he started working for Rifftrax.

“I was extremely casually acquainted with it,” he said in a phone interview.

How Lastowka came to work down the hall from former MST3K head writer and Rifftrax founder Mike Nelson is a story steeped in serendipity.

It all started when Lastowka invented a holiday.

Yes, he did and yes, it did.

Incidentally, Rifftrax’ latest live event, “Carnival of Souls,” happens Oct. 27 and can be viewed at the Regal Coldwater Crossing in Fort Wayne, among many other nationwide multiplexes.

While matriculating at the University of Virginia in the early 2000s, Lastowka and some of his buddies invented National High Five Day (which happens every third Thursday in April).

The gag went viral in a manner that most college pranksters can only dream of. And it has since evolved into a serious, charity-benefitting, annual event.

Eventually, Lastowka received an electronic mash note of sorts from the vice-president of Legend Films, a San Diego company that restores and colorizes black-and-white films.

“She emailed and said she saw it and liked it,” he said. “I saw her signature – that she was vice-president of Legend Films … And I wrote to her just like, ‘Hey, any chance that there’s a job there?’ not really knowing what they did.”

Lastowka had some video editing and social media experience so Legend hired him to fill gaps not otherwise filled at the company. And that was where and how he encountered Nelson.

Nelson was in the process of getting his pay-per-riff, movie-mocking venture, Rifftrax, off the ground with Legend’s help.

“Once Mike moved there and started what was going to be Rifftrax,” Lastowka said, “I did my best to weasel into that. It worked out where I would sort of be walking by his office and thinking of something funny to say.”

Keep in mind that Lastowka was not at this point an MST3K devotee.

“I finished high school in 1999,” he said. “We intermittently had cable. If it was still on in college, I’m sure I would have latched onto it. But I was a ‘Simpsons’ guy.”

Lastowka was eventually rewarded for stalking Nelson when the latter asked him to provide the voice of DisembAudio, a computer-generated, robotic toaster that was initially created to help Rifftrax patrons sync the audio with the video.

“I think I had a big enough job description that when he needed somebody to come in and do robot lines for RiffTrax, I had the most free time,” he said.

In due time, Lastowka was promoted to full-time writer and Rifftrax became emancipated from Legend.

Lastowka said the MST3K vets with whom he works (Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett) were patient with him in the early going.

“It was my first writing job and it was my first comedy job,” he said. “And there were these guys who’d been on TV for a decade and had won awards. Mike was very gracious about the way they would do things and he would often explain if something didn’t work. My tendency was to be darker than they were because I was younger and I didn’t understand that it wasn’t always worth going for shock value.”

Rifftrax ultimately established a creative beachhead in Minneapolis, where MST3K had been launched in 1988.

These days, however, everyone associated with Rifftrax is scattered to the four winds.

Given the nature of the collaborative creative process in the digital age, people do not have to live in the same city, or even in the same state, to work together on projects.

So when Lastowka’s wife got a job in Vermont, he was able to move there without relinquishing his Rifftrax role.

The only office where the Rifftrax creative staff regularly convenes nowadays is an online one, he said.

“We have a copy of the movie that has a time code overlaid on it,” Lastowka said. “Sometimes we will refer to scripts if they are available and we need clarification, but most of the movies that we do do not have scripts available online. But for the most part, I have a video file open on one monitor and a script in a Google doc on another monitor and I look back and forth between the two.”

The idea that Lastowka gets to live in a picturesque New England town while contributing jokes to a savory national project would incite envy in even the most placid and satisfied writer.

“It’s delightful,” he said. “I can say that without reservation. I have a chance to travel a couple times a year to the live shows. When I get to taking it all for granted, which happens sometimes, all I have to do is get to the end of one of those live shows when we’re really all sort of look at each other and thinking, ‘That was really funny. It worked. The audience responded well. Tens of thousands of people saw this all around the country and it’s something that we built.’ So you do take a step back at those times.”

There’s a flipside to that jubilation, of course and it’s wearing tighty-whiteys.

“And sometimes I’m sitting around in my underwear trying to think of a joke,” Lastowka said. “ We did this awful movie where there were literally scenes of John Carradine and his assistant digging around in a lab for 10 minutes. They would sort of move around almost in silence. When you get to minute nine of that, you think, ‘This sucks. I hate this movie.’ So that balances out some of the other stuff. Still, it’s not like I’m digging ditches here.”