While Rick & Morty has changed a lot since its earliest iteration as a Channel 101 sketch comedy series, season 5 referenced the show’s lowbrow origins with one secret nod. Rick & Morty has come a long way since the Adult Swim hit began life as a ribald parody of Back to the Future. In its earliest incarnation, Rick & Morty was originally The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti.
While some Rick & Morty episodes like season 4's hated “Claw and Hoarder” earned fan criticism for their excessive sex jokes, the crudely animated The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti was much more obscene. The cartoon comedy depicted the two title characters getting into all manner of scrapes with the central conflict of every episode being solved by the impressionable young Mharti performing lewd acts on the older Doc. It was a singularly uncomfortable style of intentionally shocking comedy and one whose humor was toned down a lot to make Rick & Morty work as a television show.
However, even with all of the show’s changes, Rick & Morty still sometimes finds time to reference its origins. For example, in one scene in Rick & Morty’s “Mortyplicity” (season 5, episode 2) Rick tells Morty that he urgently needs him to check whether he is a decoy or a real human being. The only way to do so, Rick claims, is for his grandson to inspect his anus. In a gag that would never fly in a live-action version of Rick & Morty, a reluctant Morty does so, only for Rick to fart in his face. Although the joke is much more scatological and less creepily close to sexual predation, the gag is a nod to the formula of Doc and Mharti’s adventures.
The web series would consistently see Doc solve every issue by getting Mharti to perform sexual favors for him, and the Rick & Morty season 5 scene skirts close enough to this territory for viewers to get the reference if they are familiar with the Channel 101 show. Rick farting in Morty’s face instead ensured that the Rick & Morty season 5 scene didn’t become too uncomfortable for viewers, but the setup is still a recreation of the formula found in the controversial web series. The rest of the episode veers closer to a different sort of uncomfortable, with Rick being skinned alive by a grotesque decoy of himself near the ending.
By and large, the humor of Rick & Morty has begun to rely more and more on this sort of gross-out violence, rather than comedic references to sexual trauma, in recent seasons. While earlier seasons feature some uncomfortable jokes about pedophilia, rape, and assault, Rick & Morty’s later seasons largely steer clear of such sensitive territory or handle it with more care. The divisive season 1 scene of King Jellybean molesting Morty is a prime example of the type of gag that would have worked in The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti but can seem out of place for later, more mature Rick & Morty seasons. It’s tricky for any show to find the right balance between shock value humor and avoiding crassness, but Rick & Morty season 5’s The Real Animataed Adventures of Doc and Mharti reference proves the series can still do justice to its counter-culture origins.