Epic convo: Rick & Morty’s Dan Harmon talks to Ari Melber about writing, life, incels & Ye

today i'm joined by dan harmon the emmy award-winning creator and acclaimed tv show runner of community and co-creator of rick and morty thanks for being here thank you it's an honor to be had really excited to talk with you uh my first question is based on your work uh what is the point of life i think it is to uh taste yourself because you are a taste bud on god's tongue this is exactly what i thought this was going to be like it's not what i thought it was going to be like i'm still thrown that when i reach out i'm not going to touch a tv screen do you apply the life philosophy we see in your work which is so expansive and weird to the way you do your work to the people you work with kind of our job is to create new content and we have to do that not by writing television as we perceive television is that harder now because this is the most high feedback loop meta existence we've ever had in the history of culture you're getting feedback now on the process that you're using to make it they have changed everything entirely fundamentally you've worked with all kinds of amazing and noticeable people uh let's take a look at what some of the people you've worked with say about you dan herman is a uh creator a comedian producer kind of a genius he's probably the first person to say is self-destructive i think dan would describe himself as a human hand grenade who has a predilection for pulling his own pen out is that right yeah yeah i guess so creatively i have the potential to get intensely involved and and i guess the idea of somebody exploding all over a room would be an apt metaphor do you care too much uh too much to be broke talk to the emmy uh i cared too much for sony television shout out to to them still in business with them uh cared too much for them in the era when i was producing a broadcast nbc uh sitcom i was at my office at three in the morning with a glass of booze in one hand and a and a dry erase marker in the other in an empty office literally crying as i broke a story for episode three or four of season one of community it that was caring too much but from my perspective now and from their perspective then it's hard to say whether or not i should have done it differently no i don't want to cast the situation from jersey shore in an episode of community on the off chance that that's somehow going to cause a spike that's going to keep someone from getting fired was that a corporate pitch yeah i don't want to say yes but yeah like at a certain point those those things get thrown out by nervous executives so what portion of those clashes in your view were creative what you just said versus you just thought you were a better executive than the executives i felt like we were living in a in a in an industry in decline and that i probably wasn't cut out to be a prime time broadcast show runner i had lucked into the job um i had done my best tried my best creatively to execute a show that my benefactors recognized as being the job done right i wasn't good at that creatively for me to continue to break stories about credit cards and haircuts um when what's happening in my head is i want to tell a story about loneliness or you know uh the the difference between reality and not reality but that goes to something in your work you want to tell different stories but you use a method that says all stories follow the same arc which sounds like a paradox let's look at joseph campbell and the hero's journey that is the basic motif of the hero journey leaving one condition finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature or other condition what does that mean to you i don't know that guy's a hack people will mistake it for saying all stories are the same or all stories follow the same structure even um i it's a very nuanced difference to say information has shapes there's a shape to a run-on sentence and there's a shape to a run-on sentence that turns into a story and when those shapes start to take on the approximation of something that's more digestible to us you can feel the click is the click familiar or is the click truth familiar it just feels right it's and it's difficult to tell the difference between oh this feels right because it reminds me of star wars or an episode of friends that i saw that can be very hard to tell from this feels right because this is real so how many steps are there in your story circle i boiled it down to eight because campbell's work is campbell's work and all of my work is a kind of hacky attempt to distill his very cultural work down to almost a kind of very aspergery matter of math so for the young girl or boy watching thinking i would love to get my feelings out there the way dan harmon does you would say start by finding eight eight steps in your story i think they should start by getting the clay on the table in the form of a blog or uh you know anything just like start start right what you want is to demystify the process of pulling and getting it out but your metaphor here brings us to something else in your work which is the power of poop yes let's look at rick and morty in the search uh for a good toilet experience now come on where are you going to poop where wherever you want forever my god where are we what is this that's it get out you can make a perfectly realized toilet-filled simulation of heaven but you can't share a toilet don't insult my craft why was a perfect toilet so important to rick's heaven i think that rick is very averse to having a normal spiritual connection with the unknown i think that he is out of control of so many things in the universe to hand the universe the reigns over that one moment where you are making your stuff it's a deal breaker for him this is how you measure the value of a man's life is whether or not he is the king on his throne so does that episode tell us there's something wrong with rick does it have judgment in it yeah rick is right i think about half the time and wrong about half the time he's wrong from the moment he takes his first step into bothering to secure it does rick's knowledge and awareness of the universe make his life harder to lead and enjoy yeah and doesn't that take you back to the timeless question of what's the point of learning more if i just have to get through my week yeah it's rough and i think that that's maybe the one area of overlap between community and rick and morty which really have completely different almost opposite religions communities religion communities religion is that anything that is human is more valuable than anything inhuman any system any rule if it does not have a beating heart it is wrong compared to anything with a beating heart and what is rick and morty's religion rick and morty's religion is nobody exists on purpose if you are terrified by that the best we can say is you're not alone but that brings you back to joseph campbell who argued that in confronting life's apparent lack of purpose we take more control over assigning our own purpose yes which we see in rick and morty as well to some degree nobody exists on purpose nobody belongs anywhere everybody's gonna die come watch tv am i evil worse you're smart when you know nothing matters the universe is yours and i've never met a universe that was into it what is my purpose you pass butter oh my god yeah welcome to the club pal just smiling at my own writing sorry because you can edit that out the truth is in any objectively measurable sense we have become creatures that believe in humanity and systems and we struggle between those things and we can't blame our problems on boogeymen that live in the clouds or a tree branch we have to either blame ourselves or we have to stare into a void but the third option is escape yes self-medication for instance so does rick use his abilities to escape whether that's to another universe or simply to become a pickle and is that a at all a metaphor for the ways that we deny reality or turn to drugs or other efforts to just ignore what's in front of our faces rick is certainly keeping himself occupied uh i think one of the few big giant shark jumpers of rick and morty is does he have a larger goal that he hasn't shared yet or is what you see what you get rick is obviously in a state where there is something left to be done or he'd just be sitting on a couch with a needle in his arm if he's working on something then i guess that would yeah that would ruin the show so he's not working on something well no i guess it would ruin the show for me to for me to know it slash say it you take this fictional universe seriously your job is to take it seriously and not taking it seriously results in less mortgage being paid plenty of people look at this from the outside and would think if you have a cartoon show that is renewed long enough as yours is and people seem to love it the ins and outs of the consistency of the universe are probably not going to make or break the show yeah that's true and i i i won't lie i uh i think i've made a very healthy choice in the wake of signing that agreement to uh go home at 5 pm signing the new deal made you more chill yeah do other people notice that as best you can tell yeah i think so but there's such a high turnover in writer's rooms i mean you're always working with a new bumper crop so does the age and the diversity of that room affect the references and the fun of the show which i ask uh in service to this clip of some of the different references you guys make welcome to anatomy park this is insane spleen mountain bladder falls pirates of the pancreas i ain't worried about no earth blowing up man what why not yo this is why what the you can turn into ice hey why do you have futures self-titled album on vinyl look closer oh sh he signed it closer he signed it in molly and percocet i could spend all night down here is your question did we progress from jurassic park jokes to future uh jokes because we started adding younger people to the room yes and did you know about futures mask off or did your writers bring it to you and then you guys iterate off that that's justin roiland uh my co-creator partner there was a placeholder in that episode where the dragons got a horde and we knew that justin being the compulsive collector among us you know that the things that would make rick start to respect the dragon for his horde we shouldn't bother brainstorming a list of them ourselves we should just have justin you know say the kinds of things that he would value which are going to range from weird police academy action figures from the 80s that he hasn't removed from the box to things that probably involving hip-hop and and what does it tell us about the dragon that he likes trap music on vinyl it tells rick that uh that it there's something underneath him uh that doesn't have to do with the ruthless hierarchical game of uh who's who's more powerful do you feel like the internet has revealed that there were far more pop culture fans and nerds than we knew yes yes the internet revolution was in everyone realizing that they were a nerd because what nerds are are people that are experts in something that is on some level pointless to someone else so when the society have to retire the idea that that nerds are not cool didn't that happen in like 99 how's that happen and then the nerds became the bullies for sure the word nerd was co-opted and there are militant nerds out there that resent that day i look back and say how long did we spend wishing that every movie was about a comic book character instead of a retired cop like how long did we endure this society now we've taken over and you say the nerds become the bullies so you see part of the internet as a sort of a nerd animal farm yeah it is i mean well it's a sewer i guess that's a good metaphor it's where all the worst of us goes you've spoken out about people who may like your work and do things you disagree with which anyone with a large following is going to have to deal with but do you see anything in particular about people who feel somehow disaffected and some of your work speaks to them but they're still out there online doing things that are bullying and hateful yeah i totally understand it i mean it it i i was what we might have called an incel you know when i was 27. i look at my early like bloggings and things and i'm i'm i am the kid that annoys the hell out of me on my instagram how do you define that term uh the guy who's angry at women uh because he feels entitled to uh company and uh is wondering when the world uh became a big uh illusion whose job was to deprive him of that which satisfies him like this isn't how cool people think like if you're in control of your life which i am now you're not going to think that way the big question is are you an honest person are you a person or are you a collection of reactions kanye west you offered him a whole episode of rick and morty as his playground he comes down and meets with your team wearing a rick and morty hoodie will this episode still happen time will tell i think that when kanye signs on as he did to do an episode it's not just going to be like kanye doing a guest voice or kanye doing a song it's like we agreed that it needed to be really interwoven with the rick and morty franchise having its own integrity and kanye having his own without spoiling any details of what that story would be suffice it to say that the end result was going to be a lot of original music i think that at that point that's when seven different corporations and i don't fault them this because this is their job they have to say wait a minute whoa slow down psychos like what are you what are you doing who owns what when you met with kanye did you discuss specific plot lines yeah very much so we were breaking an episode within moments what was his level of knowledge about the rick and morty universe everything he's a huge fan yeah what did you learn about him he is an incredible listener his reputation as an icon which you know resonates with me a little bit is sort of like oh he he'll just talk and talk and talk the interesting thing about kanye is he lacks in my opinion the very uncharismatic quality usually goes with that personality trait which is not liking being interrupted i think that when tmz shows a story about him going into the oval office and talking for 40 minutes and saying crazy things it's because donald trump is not on his level and i had a conversation with this guy we talked for four hours and i think we we talked as much everyone at the table did because what about rick and morty speak sorry sorry all right please don't interrupt me it's annoying and unprofessional okay take it again um what were you asking what about rick and morty speaks to him the guilty fantasy that we are the smartest one in the room that we know better that we have bigger fish to fry and that we're surrounded by people that don't get it are we supposed to identify with rick it's i would say if you were a perfectly healthy person my theory would be that you find yourself identifying with rick and morty in alternation you're saying that there's a little bit of rick and morty in all of us yes that's what i'd say you like game of thrones game of thrones showrunner said rick and morty is quote our generation's most powerful exploration of what it means to be a person in this universe so why am i even here if i had read that quote online i could have put that above i got to get on our email bur there's only so much stuff i have to do to prove my mom wrong how does that make you feel it feels fantastic i've met those guys before and they're they're really smart really nice do you immediately respond with a joke because something about that level of affirmation makes you uncomfortable yeah who would be made comfortable by affirmation i would say a well-adjusted person who's proud of the work they do no tom cruise is the answer so you're wrong i love tom cruise by the way i don't think it just makes an easy target because he's so confident and like makes eye contact and i'm sure if you gave him a compliment he'd be like thank you so much he'd respond appropriately i always like to do uh a lightning round which gives you the license to be as concise as possible a word or a sentence uh but i can see that as a open question with dan hartman you have my permission to talk less lightning round live action or animation animation scripted or improv scripted rick or morty rick you would give creative control over a future episode too vince gilligan the creator of breaking bad barack obama fantastic orator donald trump shadow of the worst parts of myself favorite tv show concept knight rider uh uh execution x-files uh uh uh world building twin peaks uh uh uh uh uh spirit max headroom the american adaptation of max headroom when dan harmon has writer's block he drinks the best advice you repeat is don't drink when you have writer's block one thing people actually get wrong about you is that i have contempt for them and what they get right about you is i think i'm better than them what makes you happy getting to go back and re-answer those last two questions failure means success i know that sounds corny but that's what it is doing it wrong and success means you've done it wrong enough i really believe that on that note very inspiring very sarcastic ari i appreciate it read loud and clear duly noted bad interview worst guest you've ever had got it can never look at you the same way i'll just stare at the ticker and listen to your voice just imagine we're shaking hands at the end that's right we didn't contextualize this we don't know when it'll air we're in the middle of a we won't make it too weird plague this was fantastic thank you it was truly an honor and the last human contact i'm going to have for up to you exactly so you go deeper in the bunker

Channel: MSNBC

Views: 335,799

Keywords: MSNBC, MSNBC latest, Politics, News

Id: iA7KleaqrAE

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021