I have a theory that both poopy butthole AND Rick are both parasites, but are sophisticated enough to create bad memories and bleed. Essentially, they're the more advanced "Queen" parasites that spawn the rest of them.
Poopy Butthole is an obvious one- well he wasn't in the past episodes so that's a given. But other than that, what kind of name is "Poopy Butthole?" This could be a different dimension, but for the sake of this theory we'll assume that theirs is similar to ours. Poopy Butthole obviously doesn't belong on earth, but nobody questions the fact that he's a small yellow french fry thing that wears a top hat. Even the doctor at the end of the episode helps him through physical therapy like he's a normal human. She doesn't say "What the fuck is this talking yellow thing", like one would expect. This leads me to believe that poopy butthole is actively changing the memories of people around him to convince them that he's nothing out of the ordinary.
Now Rick being fake is obviously harder to accept because WE remember him. (This is actually something I thought about even before I watched "Total Rickall".) But like the talking giraffe said at 12:59, it's really strange that a mad scientist inventor with a flying car just showed up on their doorstep after being gone for years. But the abnormality goes beyond what the other parasites were willing to admit. If once again we are to assume that their dimension is like ours, isn't it a little strange how easily the Smiths go back to the status quo even after all of these wacky adventures? No human has ever even visited another planet, let alone gone to other solar systems, communicated with other intelligent life, and even traveled to other dimensions. The Smiths do this on a regular basis, but they still act like a normal family. For fuck's sake, in "Mortynight Run". Jerry snuck aboard Rick's car-sized interstellar spacecraft, traveled to an inter-dimensional hub where there were dozens of other copies of himself from different dimensions, and then was brought back. Yet only two episodes later his biggest worry is being unemployed!? In "Raising Gazorpazorp", Summer travels to another planet in a distant solar system and communicates with another intelligent society. Yet when she returns and Beth asks where she was, she just casually says "On Gazorpazorp, where were you?". Summer, you just made contact with intelligent life that spoke english, and you're treating it like it's the subject of smalltalk!?
And let's not forget the whole incident in "Lawnmower Dog" where EVERY SINGLE DOG ON EARTH became intelligent and formed their own society, shortly enslaving mankind before leaving for another dimension. How the fuck does everyone on earth just return to normal society after that! Nobody even mentions it, either! The only way we know that it all took place in the same dimension is the fact that we don't see a single dog in any of the later episodes. (I could have sworn that there was a dog in M-Night.shyam-aliens, but it turns out that Mrs. Spencer was just walking a cat on a leash.)
There are countless examples of this throughout the entire series. If you really think about all the adventures the Smiths have been on with Rick, it seems much more likely that these are all just false memories, rather than actual events that happened.
So what's the reality of everything? We can't really know for sure. Maybe Rick Sanchez was just Beth's alcoholic father that abandoned her at a young age and was later found dead from Alchohol overdose. Ever since then, a sophisticated parasite that got to earth from a comet or some shit has been toying with the Smiths' memories to make them think that he's been alive all of this time and goes on wacky science adventures with them. In "Total Rickall" the parasite known as "Rick" tried to go one step further and multiply. Perhaps this is all happening only a short amount of time after he first came to Earth, and everything that happened before are just implanted memories. "Rick" probably was dissatisfied with the craftsmanship of his spawn (of course due to the fact that they cannot be injured without revealing their true nature, or create bad memories like Rick can) so he killed all of them except for Poopy Doopy (which IS able to be injured) and changed everyone's memories once more to mask it all up as just another wacky adventure that happened. That's just a random theory I came up with, anyways.
What do you guys think? Am I overthinking this?