Pickle Rick and the Cult of Self-Congratulation

The Szechuan sauce incident was embarrassing for everyone involved, including the adults who waited in line for hours at McDonald’s and then rioted when the supply ran out. The promotion was for a dipping sauce tied to a joke on a cartoon. The cartoon was, to be fair, very good—but the relationship some viewers have developed with Rick and Morty crossed from enthusiasm into something resembling a personality disorder a long time ago.

It’s hard to talk about the show without wading through its fanbase first. My Little Pony bronies, for all their notoriety, are at least enthusiastic without being aggressive about it. Adventure Time fans have a certain gentle melancholy. Rick and Morty fans have decided the show is a litmus test for intelligence and that they, naturally, have passed it. The smugness is extraordinary. The irony is that the actual text is much funnier and sadder and stranger than its loudest supporters suggest—Dan Harmon built something genuinely weird, and Pickle Rick, for all its meme saturation, actually earns its absurdism.

Harmon sat down with GQ to walk through some of the show’s most viral moments—the Pickle Rick episode, the Szechuan sauce chaos, the unusually blunt product placement for a Nintendo handheld—and the conversation is worth reading. He’s self-aware about the cult without being dismissive of it, which is the only honest position available to him. The man created Community and watched it get cancelled and revived and cancelled again. He knows something about having a devoted audience and a chaotic relationship with mainstream success.

What I keep coming back to is how strange it is that a late-night animated sci-fi show became the object people use to signal their own sophistication. The show is genuinely intelligent. But intelligence isn’t a club, and the fans who treat it like one are exactly the kind of people Rick Sanchez would despise.