Harmontown is a 2014 feature documentary profiling the writer and showrunner Dan Harmon, as he tours his podcast of the same name around the US. In it, a murderer’s row of comic talent line up to pay their respects to the creator of the dazzlingly overwrought, criminally undervalued sitcom Community. Ben Stiller calls him “kind of a genius”. John Oliver, the British stand-up whom Harmon cast in a recurring guest role on Community, describes him as “a human hand-grenade with a predilection for pulling his own pin out”. Sarah Silverman, who headhunted Harmon to write for her own comedy series The Sarah Silverman Program, sums it up. “I’m his biggest fan,” she says. “And I fired him.”

A mercurial, wild-bearded, apparently abrasive 42-year-old from Wisconsin, Harmon is a total cult. While feuding with NBC, the exasperated network which fired him as Community showrunner after three seasons, then hastily wooed him back, Harmon publicly declared it was trying to “smother the show with a pillow”. It often seemed like the behind-the-scenes drama of the programme – which screened on EPG nosebleed channel Sony TV in the UK – was reaching a much wider audience than ever tuned in to the actual show. When Harmon clashed repeatedly with disgruntled cast member Chevy Chase, there was the additional pleasure of seeing industry commentators having to attribute “Dan Harmon Poops”, his now-dormant Tumblr, as their source for quotes. Harmon eventually admitted: “I’m a selfish baby and a rude asshole.”

On the line from his office in Burbank, Harmon does not sound much like an asshole. Even though Community was finally laid to rest this summer after a last-gasp sixth-season resurrection on Yahoo, he sounds upbeat, even jaunty. He loves the UK, particularly our most enduring gift to world culture. “The pubs over there are absolutely perfect,” he says. “I love to hang out in those pubs.”

Harmon’s infectious enthusiasm might be because his current project, the mind-bending animated sci-fi Rick And Morty, has some critical wind in its sails. Currently midway through a successful second series on the oddball US network Adult Swim, the show, co-created by Harmon and actor-animator Justin Roiland, has already been recommissioned for a third season. Earlier this year, this funhouse mirror version of Back To The Future’s Doc and Marty even ramraided the mainstream. Rick and Morty crashed their flying saucer into the Simpsons’ sofa during the opening-credits couch gag of season 26’s finale, pulverising the famous clan into marmalade globs. (“No more guest animators, man!” complained Bart.)

Harmon’s segue from live-action to animation isn’t particularly surprising. One of the things that delighted Community’s small but vocal fanbase was Harmon’s restless tinkering with the form, like zapping his underachieving study group into a 16-bit video game or making a Christmas episode in Claymation. “Community was designed from the ground up to be, in my mind, the perfect live-action prime-time network sitcom,” he says. “All the experimentation was my attempt to make that very unreal universe as real as possible by making it more challenging and deeper.”

Interviewing Harmon is like talking to an oil strike: gushing, messy, enriching. One moment he’s raving about Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, the next he’s pinpointing the key tonal differences between Ghostbusters 1 and 2. There’s a similar chaotic feel to Rick And Morty, a show that parodies Star Trek’s space-safari optimism by sending brilliant but perma-drunk inventor Rick and his fearful grandson Morty on wild sci-fi adventures with disastrous consequences. An intergalactic talent show forces them to team up with Ice-T to write a song that will save the world from destruction, while an Inception-style dream heist in a teacher’s brain ends up with them trapped in a sex dungeon. All Rick’s self-centred meddling comes with a side-order of cosmic comeuppance: imagine Futurama directed by Michael Haneke.

Bird Dan: Harmon, pictured at Comic-Con in San Diego, 2014 Photograph: MJ Kim/Getty

The show only recently arrived in the UK on Fox, and when I ask Harmon how he would pitch it to mostly oblivious Brits, he zeroes in on the influence of both Dahl and Douglas Adams. “In the writers’ room it feels like I’m always actively referencing some parallel from Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says. “I think that’s where I learned everything about the concept of an infinite universe as entertainment, as it pertained emotionally to the common man. I don’t know if British people feel the same way about Adams as I found out they do about Ricky Gervais but I assume they still like Adams fine,” he says. “So I’d lead with that. And after that round of ass-kissing, I would get really belligerent, then start throwing stuff around until I got bounced out of whatever pub we were in. Then I’d start crying and would confess I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I just try and sound smart when I drink.”

As the show gathers momentum – incoming Late Show host and mega-fan Stephen Colbert cameos as an alien scientist in season two – the universe appears to have finally aligned for Harmon. But he’s not resting on his space laurels. “I have a midwestern American phobia about having all my eggs in one basket and losing my home and stuff,” he says. “So I’m trying to arrive at a work mode that allows me to scatter myself efficiently. I’ve got nine projects with younger writers that I’m supposed to be exec-producing right now. I’m very naive about time management.”

Dan in unreal life: Jeff Winger and Jim Rash in Harmon’s Community. Photograph: Getty

There’s also the continuing saga of Harmontown. Since 2012, the weekly podcast that grew out of his improv comedy night has been a dense, unfiltered insight into his churning, pop culture-saturated mind. Harmon hopes the podcast is “eternal” because it requires “zero effort” and he finds it therapeutic. In fact, he reckons the podcast boom has benefited the US comedy ecosystem as a whole. “It’s been making superstars of some really wonderful people who have always been less appreciated than they should have been.”

He may have enough on his plate, but after manoeuvring one way, could Harmon ever imagine taking Rick And Morty back into the live-action realm? “Maybe one day, when Justin and I are old and feeble, they’ll make some kind of horrible movie based on nostalgia for the property.” he laughs. “That would actually be great. But if you’re going to do a live-action show about an incredibly smart person travelling through time and space? Just call it Doctor Who.”

Rick And Morty starts 11pm, Thursday, Fox UK

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