In the dust of the multiverse? How black comedy in Rick and Morty elaborates on and challenges Eugene Thacker’s cosmic pessimism

Abstract

This thesis reads the American animated comedy, Rick and Morty, can be alongside and against Eugene Thacker’s “cosmic pessimism”, a pessimistic posthumanist philosophy elaborated over various works. The aim is to see how an understanding of the tenets of cosmic pessimism can enrich a reading of Rick and Morty, and moreover to see what challenges Rick and Morty poses for cosmic pessimism itself, since this latter, according to Thacker, takes the distinctly un-comedic genre of supernatural horror, not he animated sitcom, as the privileged site of its elucidation. In order to carry out this investigation, the work considers Rick and Morty within two different traditions: that of dark comedy, and that of the postmodern sitcom. These guide the reading, with an understanding of the postmodern sitcom providing the tropological and contextual ground of the investigation and the major features of dark humour — specifically irony and the grotesque — providing the structure by which the analysis proceeds. This investigation aims to explore Rick and Morty as a truly distinctive text at the confluence of diverse aesthetic and philosophical notions, and in so doing will challenge and modify the conclusions of Thacker’s cosmic pessimism.