This Is the ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Joke That Fans Ask Danny DeVito About the Most

If you ever bump into Danny DeVito in the wild and feel the urge to yell a quote from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, odds are you won’t be the first person that day to scream about a very drunk piece of meat.

Over nearly two decades as Frank Reynolds, DeVito has done everything from crawling naked out of a pleather couch to singing about the troll toll. But when he was asked which joke fans bring up to him the most during the show’s 20th-anniversary celebrations, he didn’t hesitate. It isn’t the toe knife. It isn’t the couch. It isn’t even the Nightman Cometh.

It’s the Rum Ham.

In a recent interview timed to the 20-year milestone, DeVito talked about how one chaotic shore-side bit from Season 7 somehow became his most requested reference. Younger fans, especially, don’t see him just as Frank or as the Penguin or as the guy from Matilda. To them, he’s “the Rum Ham guy” the man who yelled after a floating hunk of cured pork like it was his child.

The Joke That Floated Away: What Rum Ham Actually Is

To understand why this is the one joke people ask about, you have to go back to “The Gang Goes to the Jersey Shore,” the second episode of Season 7. In the episode, Dennis and Dee chase their childhood memories of the Jersey Shore while Mac and Frank do what Mac and Frank do best: make terrible choices on a beach covered in broken glass and medical waste.

Frank shows up with his proud culinary invention a whole ham soaked in rum. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a dense, salty sponge for as much liquor as it can possibly absorb. The plan is simple and extremely Frank: eat the ham, get drunk, avoid spending money on actual beach drinks.

Naturally, things go sideways. Mac and Frank end up drifting out to sea on a cheap inflatable raft. At some point, the ham slips into the water and starts floating away. Frank, panicking, screams for it at the top of his lungs, clinging to the meat like Tom Hanks clutching the volleyball in Cast Away. The delivery is pure DeVito desperate, high-pitched, and absolutely committed.

On paper, it’s a simple gag: man loses booze ham. On screen, it’s instantly iconic. You’ve got DeVito in swim trunks, chop sideburns, and full “sun-damaged goblin” energy, shrieking at a wobbling ham bobbing in the Atlantic. The camera treats it like a dramatic loss, complete with emotional weight completely unearned by the object in question which is exactly the kind of tonal whiplash Always Sunny loves.

How Rum Ham Became Danny DeVito’s Most-Quoted Bit

DeVito has plenty of contenders for most-memed moment. There’s the naked couch scene in “A Very Sunny Christmas,” the infamous toe knife reveal, the troll-toll musical number in “The Nightman Cometh,” and the line that launched a thousand stickers: “Can I offer you a nice egg in this trying time?”

But when pressed about what fans mention the most, DeVito has said that Rum Ham is the clear winner. At the 20th anniversary and Season 17 press events, he described it as the joke that has gone through “many iterations of the zeitgeist,” especially among younger fans who discovered the show via streaming. For them, Frank isn’t just a sleazy bar co-owner; he’s the guy who loved his drunken ham more than his own safety.

Even DeVito himself talks about filming that sequence like it was a fever dream. Sitting in a raft, bobbing out on the water with a liquor-soaked ham, repeating the same frantic lines while the meat drifts away it’s the kind of wild day at work only Always Sunny could provide. Years later, he still laughs about how much fun they had and cheerfully insists that soaking ham in rum is “very good” (although, as he jokes, probably not for the pig).

That behind-the-scenes glee matters. You can feel how committed he is to the bit. The scene works not because of elaborate special effects or a complex setup, but because DeVito plays it with the emotional intensity of a prestige drama while flailing in ocean water over deli meat.

Why Rum Ham Hits So Hard for Always Sunny Fans

It’s the Perfect Frank Reynolds Joke

Rum Ham is Frank in a nutshell. It combines every part of his personality: his love of booze, his willingness to debase himself physically, his complete disregard for health, and his tendency to form deep attachments to deeply questionable things.

This is a man who has proudly brand-launched “Frank’s Fluids,” used a toe knife he keeps in a shared couch, and crawled through vents like a raccoon with a 401(k). Of course he brings a rum-soaked ham to the beach as his main drinking plan. Of course he reacts to losing it more dramatically than most people react to losing a pet.

It’s Visual, Loud, and Easy to Quote

Part of the staying power is that Rum Ham works on multiple levels. Even if you don’t fully know the setup, the sight of DeVito screaming from a raft is inherently funny. Add in the simple, repeatable wording and you get a perfect internet-ready clip: a short, looping moment you can turn into a GIF or reaction video without needing context.

Fans can shout the line at conventions, wear it on T-shirts, or caption it on social media. It doesn’t require setup or explanation. It just taps into that specific brand of chaotic despair that defines Always Sunny, where the tragedy isn’t noble or profound it’s losing your alcoholic ham to the tide.

It’s a Tiny Tragedy Played at Epic Scale

What really seals it is the emotional overreaction. Rum Ham is a joke about priorities. Frank is drifting on the ocean in a dangerously small raft, with no clear plan and no visible safety equipment. The thing he’s truly devastated about, however, is the ham. That mismatch between what should matter and what does matter is basically the show’s entire worldview in one shot.

When DeVito calls Rum Ham the iconic joke fans ask about most, he’s recognizing that the moment captures the essence of the show’s tone: stupid, dark, desperate, and weirdly sincere.

The Rum Ham Ripple Effect: Memes, Merch, and Real Recipes

Once the episode aired, Rum Ham left the Jersey Shore and headed straight for the internet. Fans clipped the scene, looped Frank’s wail, and added it to reaction GIF arsenals. The image of DeVito on the raft became shorthand for “me watching my bad life decisions float away.”

From there, Rum Ham jumped into the real world. Online marketplaces filled up with Rum Ham apparel: distressed vintage-style shirts apologizing to Rum Ham, graphic tees memorializing the doomed pork, and mashup designs pairing the ham with other show references. If you want to walk around in public wearing a shirt that basically announces, “I, too, would mourn my meat,” the internet has you covered.

Of course, fans also decided to make Rum Ham an actual dish. Fan wikis and blogs share homemade versions of the recipe: ham steaks or full hams marinated in a mix of rum, pineapple, and brown sugar, all promising that you too can get “ham-mered.” Some attempts lean into authenticity (right down to serving it on something inflatable), while others refine it into something closer to a tropical holiday roast.

Is it a good idea to combine large quantities of rum, unrelenting sunshine, and a heavy cured meat? The show’s answer is a resounding “yes, until it goes horribly wrong.” Fans seem happy to recreate the experience at home, minus the getting-lost-at-sea portion.

Rum Ham vs. the Rest of Danny DeVito’s Sunny Hall of Fame

The wild thing about Rum Ham claiming the top spot is how stacked DeVito’s Always Sunny highlight reel already is. Any other actor would kill to have even one moment on Frank’s resume.

• The naked couch “rebirth” in the Christmas episode has become holiday meme canon.
• The “troll toll” song in The Nightman Cometh lives permanently in people’s heads.
• The toe knife, the hand sanitizer showers, the man-cheetah costume every season adds at least one new piece of cursed iconography.
• One line about offering “a nice egg in these trying times” turned into a separate meme industrial complex, complete with stickers and shirts of DeVito holding up an egg.

Yet Rum Ham still manages to float above them all. It’s not the most elaborate stunt or the filthiest punchline. What it has, more than anything, is pure emotional clarity. It’s DeVito pouring every ounce of his comic energy into one incredibly stupid crisis and treating it like the most important moment of Frank’s life.

That kind of commitment is hard to top. Even when fans bring up other bits, DeVito keeps circling back to Rum Ham as the one that really stuck the joke that younger viewers, new binge-watchers, and long-time obsessives alike seem to agree on.

Frank Reynolds, Late-Career Chaos Icon

Another reason this particular joke resonates is what it represents for DeVito himself. When he joined It’s Always Sunny in Season 2, he was already an established film and TV star. Rum Ham is part of the show’s broader project of transforming him from “beloved character actor” into “patron saint of unhinged sitcom behavior.”

Instead of coasting on his legacy, DeVito dove into the slimiest, sweatiest version of himself, gleefully wrecking whatever dignity he had left in the name of comedy. Rum Ham is that energy distilled to its purest form: a veteran actor screaming his lungs out on a raft for a joke about alcohol-soaked pork.

The fact that this is the joke fans bring to him most often says a lot about the modern TV landscape. In an era where people watch and rewatch shows on streaming, certain scenes become comfort food. Rum Ham is a perfect example: it’s short, it’s loud, it’s absurd, and it captures the show’s spirit in a single, immortal, extremely dehydrated moment.

From Cons to Kitchens: Life in a Rum Ham World ( of Sunny Experiences)

Spend enough time around Always Sunny fans, and you start to notice how often Rum Ham sneaks into real life. For some viewers, it’s become a kind of secret handshake: mention the phrase in a crowd and watch the people who immediately light up and shout the line back at you.

At fan conventions and live events, cast members are constantly asked to talk about the episode or, more specifically, to talk about where the ham is and whether they’d ever eat it again. People show up in Frank cosplay complete with inflatable rafts and foam hams tucked under their arms. Others arrive in Rum Ham shirts that look like vintage beer ads, proudly advertising a meat nobody would have invented outside a deeply cursed writers’ room.

Online, fans swap stories about trying to make Rum Ham for parties. Some admit they massively underestimated just how strong the dish would be, accidentally inventing a punch bowl you have to carve. Others share photos of carefully plated, glazed rum hams that look downright festive the kind of thing you might serve at a holiday gathering if your relatives had very specific taste in cable comedies.

Then there are the smaller, everyday references. People joke about “Rum Ham moments” at work, when a minor disaster feels like the end of the world because you personally were just a little too attached to whatever went wrong. Others use the floating ham as a metaphor for lost opportunities, doomed side projects, or that one vacation that got away.

In bars and restaurants, the gag shows up in cocktail menus and off-the-books specials. Bartenders christen rum-based drinks “Rum Ham” as a wink to fans, sometimes pairing them with salty snacks just to drive the joke home. It’s probably for the best that very few establishments attempt a full, canon-accurate Rum Ham entrée, but the spirit of the bit lives on every time someone lifts a glass and says, “To Rum Ham” like they’re toasting a fallen comrade.

Even people who haven’t seen the full episode often recognize the meme on sight. They’ve seen a GIF of DeVito on a raft or a screenshot of Frank sobbing in the ocean, and they know exactly what kind of unhinged tone they’re dealing with. The scene becomes a gateway into the show: “If this is what a random Season 7 beach episode looks like,” new viewers think, “what are the really weird episodes like?”

For longtime fans, the joke has taken on a kind of nostalgic warmth. Rum Ham comes from a specific era of the show far enough into the series that the writers knew exactly who Frank was, but early enough that they were still gleefully one-upping themselves with every new season. Rewatching the episode feels like returning to a particular vintage of Sunny, when the gang was slightly younger, the stakes were slightly lower, and Frank was still discovering new ways to destroy his body for the bit.

So when fans run into Danny DeVito and choose one line to yell across a street, a convention floor, or a late-night talk show audience, Rum Ham is the natural choice. It’s a tiny, ridiculous piece of television that somehow contains everything they love about him the commitment, the chaos, and the willingness to treat a chunk of ham like a tragic lost love. If you’re going to bother a comedy legend with one quote from his long career, you might as well make it one that involves him screaming in the ocean.

The Joke That Will Outlive the Ham

In the grand ranking of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia jokes, there will always be debates. Some fans will champion the musical episodes; others will swear by the long-running gags like Charlie’s illiteracy or the Waitress saga. But when the man at the center of the chaos says Rum Ham is the joke he hears about most, it’s hard to argue.

It’s short, it’s stupid in the smartest possible way, and it captures both Frank Reynolds and Danny DeVito at their absolute best. A veteran actor, absolutely fearless, giving a prestige-drama performance to a doomed piece of cured meat. No wonder fans can’t stop asking him about it.

Rum Ham may have floated away in the episode, but in real life, it’s not going anywhere.