The Secret Love Language of Pop Culture References

“I’m Pickle Rick!” yells a college-aged goth walking down the street with friends, all holwing with laughter. Several passersby give their boisterous noise the stinkeye.
“Snake jazz!” Yells another one, and the crew of misfits hiss, snap their fingers, and giggle.

Several more passersby express disapproval at the chaos. give the rowdy young adults the stinkeye, but a few in-the-know fans of the adult animated show “Rick and Morty” smirk. A good joke? Yes. A great joke? Maybe. But our goths don’t care. A reference is an inside joke, made funnier by the shared secret world. Fans of these words, especially movies and shows such as Star Wars, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Letterkenny, The Simpsons, and The Princess Bride, love spouting their favorite quotes. Internet culture, too has brought us the meme with it’s instant repeatability — from “All your base are belong to us” to “Daaaamnn, Daniel!” to whatever TikTok is trending today. Spend a days repeating it back and forth with your friends until you’ve used up all of its joy and then on to the next thing.

A reference to a beloved piece of media is a mating call —when I make a passing reference to the spinach dip at a party being “perfectly cromulent”, I’m sending my signal flare up — I’m shooting a beacon for fellow Simpsons fans, other weirdos like me tuned into my Simpsons frequency. If…