I Don’t Know Rick, Looks Fake to Me

About

No Lo Sé Rick, Parece Falso or I Don’t Know Rick, Looks Fake to Me refers to a reaction image macro featuring Chumlee and Rick Harrison from the reality show Pawn Stars, used to express doubt or disbelief about claims, events or headlines that seem suspicious or seem too good to be true.

Origin

On January 21st, 2013, episode 237 “Funny Money” of the 7th season of Pawn Stars was aired. In one of its scenes, Chumlee and Rick take a look at a scissor katar brought in by a customer, and Chumlee starts playing with the artifact while joking about how Edward Scissorhands uses it to prune bushes (shown below). Contrary to popular belief, the phrase was never said by any character throughout the series, and thus the meme caused a Mandela Effect among many Hispanic fans of the series.

According to Google Trends, queries for the phrase “No lo sé Rick” date back to December 18th, 2016. The earliest available example of the meme was posted to Dopl3r on December 19th, with the caption “When the prettiest girl of the class asks you out :v” and the watermark @AahcSelccth (shown below).

Spread

On December 20th, 2016 the template spread to other Spanish-speaking pages on Facebook,Taringa! and Memedroid (examples shown below, from left to right).

On December 24th, 2016, Colombian influencer Nicolás Arrieta posted to Facebook a screenshot of one of his tweets in which he uses the reaction image with the caption “When they say Merry Christmas to me and I have to say Merry Christmas back” (shown below, left). The post gathered over 24,000 reactions and was shared over 3,800 times in four years.

On February 21st, 2018, the Facebook page Memes de Ciencias Sociales posted the meme accompanied by a photo of a fake parent note excusing a student for skipping class due to being sick (shown below, right). The image got over 5,900 reactions and 1,400 comments, and was shared over 19,000 times as of December 2020.

Catchphrase

Eventually, the phrase from the meme became popular without the image, appearing in many headlines from Hispanic news sites and online magazines, such as Rock&Pop, El País and UltimaHora.

On social media, the phrase has been used as the title or caption of various clips and memes. On August 18th, 2019, Imgur user therefreezingupinbuffalostuckintheircars posted a Bottlecap Challenge video with the title “I don’t know Rick… it looks fake” (shown below, left). Similarly, on March, 13th, 2020, a parody video of Rick Harrison and a customer bargaining for toilet paper (shown below, right) was posted to 9GAG.

Chumlee’s TikTok video

On July 24th, 2020, Chumlee posted a video to TikTok in which he examines a The Simpsons figurine and concludes his review with the quote “I don’t know Rick, it looks fake” (shown below). The post reached over 1.7 million views and 124,200 likes in less than 5 months.

Template

Various examples

Search Interest

Search queries for both “No lo sé Rick” and “No lo sé rick parece falso” start on December 18th, 2016, and peak on May and July 2017 respectively. Searches for the shortened version of the phrase “no lo sé rick” increase in volume during 2018. Searches for the Portuguese version of the phrase have slighty increased since early 2017.

Know Your Meme Store

External References