Rick Ripping Wallpaper Off the Wall

What is in the frame

A room with light beige wallpaper. On the left, on a chest of drawers, stands a blue vase with dry branches. Rick, in a white lab coat with wide eyes and a serious face, points with both hands at a torn-open wall: behind the ripped wallpaper a red background is revealed, bearing the Pringles logo with the mustachioed man in a red bow tie. The word “Pringles” is written in yellow letters.

Importantly, this is not an episode of the series itself but a frame from a commercial that uses the “Rick and Morty” characters. Rick’s gesture resembles that of a presenter at a presentation, and it is this pose that became the basis of the meme.

The advertisement that started it all

According to descriptions, the commercial was released on January 28, 2020, and aired during Super Bowl LIV (February 2, 2020). It was devoted to Rick and Morty ending up inside a Pringles ad. Rick discovers that the world around him is part of an advertisement and points at the logo. According to reports, the commercial was also linked to a joke about the long gap between seasons of the show.

A few days after the release, users on Reddit and other platforms began replacing the logo with their own phrases. The template quickly became “presentational”: only the thing Rick points at changes.

How the template works

The joke is built on the formula of “revelation.” Rick demonstrates something important, as though he has uncovered a conspiracy or revealed a main secret, while in fact he shows something obvious, absurd or personal. The serious pose, the wide eyes and the two-handed gesture add pathos, and the smaller the “secret,” the funnier it is.

The second layer is irony about advertising: a person tears open a wall, and behind it is a product. Transferred to other topics, this becomes “here’s what’s really hiding” — from everyday habits to cultural stereotypes.

The template suits short “exposés” on social media: a person as if tore off the wallpaper and showed the cause of a familiar problem. It also works through self-irony, when the “main secret” turns out to be the author’s own habit.

Examples for your own caption

The logo is replaced with the text “Subscribing to everything at once costs more than a movie ticket” — Rick exposes his own “saving.”

“Why the alarm clock goes off at the sweetest moment of sleep” — the search for someone to blame in everyday life.

“My 40 open browser tabs” — a revelation the author had been hiding even from themselves.

“Everything I kept putting off was tied to one task I have long not wanted to do” — self-irony.

How to use the template

Replace the logo with a short text, and if needed add a caption above: “Rick, when he realized…” Observations that everyone has noticed but no one has put into words work well. Do not use the template to spread unconfirmed claims about real people: Rick’s gesture implies “here is the truth,” and such a presentation can mislead. The advertising origin of the frame does not get in the way of the meme, but it is not worth passing it off as a scene from the main storyline of the series.

It is most convenient to write the short caption directly in place of the logo and not to add explanations: Rick’s gesture already says “there it is.” If the caption is long, the sense of a sudden revelation is lost.