Watch the Co-Creator of ‘Rick and Morty’ Read Unused Jokes
"Holy shit! This guy hasn’t washed his hands once and it’s working for him!"
Given their “pursuit of perfection”, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the team behind Rick and Morty take great care with the show’s most important element: Its humor. But a new video demonstrates how rigorous their writing process is, with series co-creator Justin Roiland sharing some of the jokes that didn’t make the cut.
In a video uploaded to Adult Swim’s YouTube channel on July 28, Roiland and co-creator Dan Harmon detail the process of “alts,” their approach to some of the show’s jokes. Harmon will put a question mark next to a certain joke, take it to the joke room, and they’ll riff in front of the writers until they’ve found the “favorite of the room.”
Roiland then gives us some of the jokes that could have been in a scene of “Mortynight Run,” an episode from Season 2 which sees Rick and Morty play a life-simulation game called Roy.
Spoiler alert: they’re pretty darn squanchy.
Some particularly random jokes:
Holy shit! This guy hasn’t washed his hands once and it’s working for him.
Woah, this guy just unlocked the third cousin character.
Here’s the original clip from the series to see how it actually turned out:
Rick and Morty airs on Sunday at 11:30 p.m. Eastern on Cartoon Network.