Attend enough convention panels and you begin to hear the same terrible questions again and again. People will spill out paragraphs of anecdotes, as if the panelists are their confessors. Others will ask abstruse continuity questions that miss the point entirely. Someone will ask for a hug. Someone else will try to get hired. Or, like at the Rick and Morty San Diego Comic-Con panel, someone will ask comedians to explain their joke.
“So I have a question regarding the Season 2 finale: why are cobs so terrifying?” someone asked. Here’s the joke he was referring to:
Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland initially rebuffed the question, saying, “Well, as soon as we answer that, the joke dies, doesn’t it?”
It worked out in the end. Rick and Morty producer, writer and voice actor Ryan Ridley and co-creator Dan Harmon wound up riffing on it for a bit. “It’s not a joke man, they’re fucking terrifying,” Ridley said.
While the Rick and Morty panelists at Comic-Con took stupid questions in stride (largely because they felt free to mock questioners to their face), Rick and Morty producer and writer Dan Guterman (formerly of The Onion, The Colbert Report and Community) chimed in, taking a firm stance against ruining jokes with your overly-literal sensibilities.
The cob joke is just the tip of a very tedious iceberg, as anyone with experience in Rick and Morty’s online fandom can attest. Since Rick and Morty stories are both comedies and genuine science fiction adventures, the line tends to get blurred by those who would insist on order in all things.
In the wait for Rick and Morty Season 3 we have let the world become overrun with repetitive and stupid fan theories. Is Evil Morty actually an other-dimensional Rick? Might Krombopulos Michael show up alive to rescue Rick from Galactic Federation prison? Was Rick once a Morty?
The worst has to be anything involving Mr. Poopybutthole, whose appearance in the opening credits for Season 2 episode ‘Total Rickall’ can only be “logically” explained with multidimensional shenanigans that would totally destroy any continuity of characterization on the show. Of course, the real answer for why Mr. Poopybutthole appears in the opening credits is some variation on “because it’s funny,” but that will never satisfy the endless, flailing computations of the fandom megabrain.
It turns out Rick and Morty writers aren’t big fans of all these dumb fan theories either. Here’s Rick and Morty writer Mike McMahan (also known for The Next Generation Season 8):
My knee jerk when I see a Rick and Morty fan theory is "well, let's avoid that story at all costs."
— Mike McMahan (@MikeMcMahanTM) September 3, 2016
But I can’t congratulate myself too much for loathing Rick and Morty fan theories as much as the writers, since they also reserve some justified scorn for content aggregators.
excited to see how this gets spun into aggregate news.
— Mike McMahan (@MikeMcMahanTM) September 14, 2016
We’re all so desperate for some tidbit we can attach to the highly Googleable words “Rick and Morty Season 3” that we’ll write up minor Twitter groans. Sorry guys, can’t wait to see what you come up with for Rick and Morty Season 3 release date episode 1 air date trailer preview
