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