In a 2002 episode of Futurama, an alien warlord named Lrrr settles in to watch an episode of Friends, grows visibly confused, and asks the only question that makes sense to him: "Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?"
Twenty-two years later, we scored that joke. It landed a 9.0 for impact and a 9.5 for quotability — one of the highest-rated lines in the entire series.
Then we scored Friends too. It sits at 73.5 on the Humor Index. Futurama — the show that paused, mid-episode, to mock it — comes in at 77.6. The robot won.
We ran all 170 episodes of Futurama through our pipeline: every episode from the 1999 Fox debut through the 2025 Hulu revival, 11,042 jokes in total, each graded three times and averaged for consistency. Here's what the data says.
The headline number
Futurama scores 77.6, good for #12 of the 19 shows we've scored — slotting between Parks & Recreation (77.8) and Taxi (77.4). A respectable mid-pack finish for a show whose reputation rests as much on heartbreak as on punchlines.
It comes with the caveat we always make for animation: our scoring reads dialogue, so Futurama's dense visual comedy — Bender's sight gags, the background signage, the throwaway alien designs — goes largely uncounted. The 77.6 is a floor, not a ceiling.
The real story: the revival held up
Here's the finding that surprised us. The Hulu revival (2023–2025) is statistically indistinguishable from classic Futurama. Across the original 140-episode run (1999–2013), the show averaged 6.82 craft and 6.53 impact. Across the 30 revival episodes, it averaged 6.79 craft and 6.48 impact — a 0.03 gap in craft, a 0.05 gap in impact.
That almost never happens. Revivals are where beloved shows go to disappoint — the cast is older, the cultural moment has passed, the magic doesn't reignite. Futurama's revival simply… kept being Futurama. The new seasons gave us "The Numberland Gap" (81.2) and "Destroy Tall Monsters" (80.8), both of which would sit comfortably among the show's all-time best.
The single best joke is 24 years old
Of all 11,042 jokes, exactly one earned a perfect 10.0 for impact and 10.0 for quotability: Zapp Brannigan's account of his military strategy in Season 1's "Love's Labours Lost in Space."
It's sci-fi-specific absurdity that doubles as a perfect joke about bureaucratic incompetence — the exact register Futurama lives in better than any other show on the index.
A few more for the highlight reel
- "Shut up and take my money!" — Fry. The line that escaped the show entirely and became a permanent piece of internet vocabulary.
- "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." — the God-entity in "Godfellas," the franchise's most quietly profound line.
- "I'd always whisper 'except one.' Fry was that one — and I never told him so." — Bender, in "The Sting."
- "She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro." — Zapp Brannigan, naturally.
Why this is the Humor Index thesis in one show
170 episodes. Four eras. Twenty-six years. Two networks and a streamer. And across all of it, the comedy never meaningfully dropped — not after the Fox cancellation, not through the direct-to-DVD movies, not in the Comedy Central run, not in the Hulu return.
That's the whole idea behind what we do here: great comedy isn't a lightning strike, it's a craft — and craft is repeatable. Futurama is the proof.
See the full breakdown — every episode, every season, scored — on the [Futurama show page](/shows/futurama).