Rick and Morty: Learn Not To Hate Jerry | Video Essay

Rick and Morty’s Jerry Smith can be easy to hate, thanks to his lack of smarts and self-awareness. But then something changes. Support The Take on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=7792695​

Paradoxically, we need someone like him on the Justin Roiland/Dan Harmon show, and a series of new revelations make us change our minds about him.

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Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:00
“Innocent people are going to die because of me.
00:03
Why am I so mediocre?”
00:04
You would think that since Jerry is so mediocre and bland
00:08
he would evoke neutral feelings from the audience of “Rick and Morty.”
00:12
But for the most part we hate Jerry.
00:14
We really really hate him.
00:16
“You act like prey but you’re a predator.
00:18
You use pity to lure your victims — that’s how you survive!”
00:22
We feel the utmost contempt for Jerry Smith or, best case scenario, a kind of cringy pity.
00:27
“You’re doing great!”
00:29
“I know how to crawl into a tube.”
00:31
Thanks to SchwiftRickGear for sponsoring this video.
00:34
At the end we’ll show you their gorgeous “Rick and Morty” hoodies
00:37
and tell you how to get 30% off.
00:41
So why are we so disgusted by Jerry?
00:44
Well.
00:45
he’s painfully unfunny,
00:47
“So take your attitude to the men’s section of Kmart ’cause you need to cut me some slack…
00:51
S.”
00:52
often inappropriate and racist,
00:54
“You’re grossed out by her avocado-shaped head and blue skin and…”
00:58
and not especially kind or generous.
01:01
“We both know you’re not as fast as the other kids, and if you want to compete in this world,
01:04
you got to work twice as hard.”
01:06
But most of all, we hate that Jerry is literally too stupid to realize just how stupid he is.
01:12
He can not read a room to save his life.
01:15
“Umm, yeah, don’t move.
01:17
Umm, umm, umm, umm…”
01:19
Jerry is far too complacent about his own intellectual abilities, and this is infuriating.
01:24
Jerry’s limited mental capacity is a prime example of a psychological phenomenon called
01:28
the Dunning–Kruger effect.
01:30
This is a cognitive bias that makes people of low mental ability feel superior
01:35
and much smarter than they actually are.
01:38
The idea is that if you have very limited mental ability you may not be smart enough
01:42
to even imagine that there are people out there smarter than you.
01:46
So the Dunning-Kruger effect explains Jerry’s dynamic with Rick.
01:50
Jerry alone is not at all impressed by Rick — because he doesn’t even have the capacity
01:54
to even understand that Rick is such a genius.
01:57
“You know, Rick’s in his lab making cyborgs and wormholes and all that weird stuff, but
02:02
this is real science!”
02:04
Essentially, Jerry would need to be smarter to even have an inkling that Rick is so much
02:09
smarter than him.
02:10
After disgust, the second major emotion we feel for Jerry is pity.
02:15
“Loooooser…”
02:16
“What?”
02:17
He is “between advertising jobs.”
02:20
He also worries (correctly) that his household is being usurped by Rick.
02:25
And most of the time his wife pretty much hates him.
02:27
“Loving you is work, Jerry hard work, like building a homeless shelter.
02:32
Nobody wants to say no to doing it, but some people put the work in.”
02:37
So what was the point of making Jerry so pitiful and limited?
02:41
Well, firstly, since Jerry is so stupid, most audience members feel a lot smarter than him.
02:47
In fact it’s probably fair to say that the distance between Jerry’s IQ and the average
02:52
audience IQ is
02:53
comparable to the distance between Rick’s IQ and the audience’s.
02:56
So because Jerry is so unintelligent he makes us feel like superior geniuses.
03:01
Secondly, as our friends at Wisecrack pointed out, Rick and Jerry represent two diametrically
03:07
opposed existential standpoints.
03:09
Jerry doesn’t really understand much, but he seems happy in the soul-crushing senselessness
03:14
of life.
03:15
“I am helping Morty with science.”
03:17
He is happier in an alien simulation than in reality.
03:21
Meanwhile, Rick is smart enough to understand the realities of our existence,
03:25
but he’s miserable because of that.
03:27
So Jerry represents the blue pill to rick’s red pill, if you will, and it raises the question
03:32
—
03:33
is it better to be woke but miserable, or oblivious and happy?
03:36
“Listen carefully.
03:37
I stole a paperclip and I have it in my cheek, but I don’t know what to do with it.”
03:40
“Sweetie, is your shirt on backwards?”
03:43
“Yeah, I like it this way.”
03:45
Over the course of the show, this red-pill blue-pill dichotomy transforms into something
03:50
less straightforward.
03:52
We learn more about other, unexpected parts of Jerry’s personality.
03:56
His connection with Doofus Rick.
03:58
His exploration of his sexuality.
04:00
The divorce and his subsequent depression.
04:03
Plus, he sometimes has out-of-character moments of lucidity when he actually seems to understand
04:08
more than we give him credit for.
04:09
“You wanna–”
04:10
“Nah, if the family sees me like this, they’ll feel sorry for me.”
04:13
We hated Jerry for being stupid, complacent and happy when he didn’t seem to deserve that
04:19
happiness.
04:20
But the show surprises us by revealing that Jerry isn’t always happy.
04:23
And he’s not that complacent.
04:25
“Some people just can’t handle the truth.
04:28
Especially dummies like me.”
04:29
Jerry is more aware of how much everyone despises him than we thought,
04:33
and he really just wants people to like him —
04:35
so much so that he tries to give up his own penis to save intergalactic hero Shrimply
04:40
Pibbles.
04:41
“Let’s hear it again for Shrimply Pibbles, huh?”
04:43
The assumption was that Jerry was too stupid to realize how little everyone thinks of him,
04:48
which gave the characters and us freedom to be horrible to him.
04:51
“Don’t insult my father.
04:52
He’s the reason our kids are only half-stupid.”
04:55
“Hah!
04:56
You just called yourself — oh.”
04:57
So then, finding out he does notice the hate is a little heart-breaking.
05:01
All these revelations make us re-evaluate what we think of Jerry.
05:05
As we join Morty in growing more and more disillusioned with Rick, a parallel process
05:09
happens —
05:10
we begin realizing that maybe there is something to Jerry beyond infuriating stupidity and
05:15
basicness.
05:16
“This is nice.”
05:17
“Yeah.”
05:18
Initially we bought into the idea presented — that Rick is a genius and amazing, and
05:22
Jerry is despicable.
05:24
And the same thing happens in life —
05:25
we dismiss the Jerrys of the world, the people we think are close-minded,
05:30
because we think they will never have an impact and their feelings don’t matter —
05:34
that they’re too dumb to even really get that we’re treating them with contempt and
05:37
disrespect.
05:38
But dismissing people because they seem unintelligent or because you don’t agree with them isn’t
05:42
a great path to take —
05:44
after all they might have some unexpected virtues.
05:47
“Well, it couldn’t have been easy for you to say that, and I appreciate it.”
05:51
And while we don’t really see Jerry change in the show,
05:54
the other characters do change in their approach to Jerry.
05:57
Summer stops dismissing him 100% of the time and actually tries to help him.
06:01
“I want to hear you say it.”
06:03
“[Sighs deeply] Look, I’m a closeted racist, and I’m sexist and selfish,
06:09
and I dragged us all into my sexist, racist bad things because I’m stupid.”
06:13
“Thank you.”
06:14
“Now you’re gonna help me, right?”
06:15
“She just did.”
06:17
Beth realizes how much value she sees in Jerry after all.
06:21
And even Rick hangs out with him even if it was just because Morty makes him do it.
06:27
“Maybe we would have fun on a fake adventure.”
06:29
So overall the show seems to be suggesting that we could take a different approach to
06:33
the Jerrys of the world,
06:34
or the people we might think are Jerrys.
06:37
Maybe rather than just immediately dismissing them or ignoring them,
06:40
we should actually talk to people we don’t understand and find out what matters to them,
06:45
because helping each other change and grow is ultimately the way to go.
06:49
“Jerry, remember that time you left a comment underneath that YouTube video and someone
06:53
replied and called you a dumb-ass,
06:54
so you replied and told them, ‘it takes one to know one,’ and you stayed up all night
06:57
hitting ‘refresh’ on your browser
06:58
waiting for them to reply and then you fell asleep crying?
07:01
This is like that!
07:02
You can’t make people like you.
07:03
You just have to wait for hating you to bore them.”
07:06
“You know, you’re right!
07:07
I shouldn’t be motivated by other people’s opinions of me.”
07:10
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07:14
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07:17
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07:18
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07:20
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07:23
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07:27
“Nobody exists on purpose!
07:29
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07:31
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07:32
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07:33
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07:37
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07:38
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07:41
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07:45
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07:50
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This post was previously published on Youtube.
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