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 73.2 on the Humor Index. Futurama — the show that paused, mid-episode, to mock it — comes in at 77.8. The robot won. (Both shows are scored on the same pre-2026 scale, so that's a clean head-to-head.)
We ran 137 episodes of Futurama through our pipeline — the 1999 Fox debut through the 2025 Hulu revival, 8,900 jokes in total, each graded three times and averaged for consistency. Here's what the data says.
The headline number
Futurama scores 77.8, which puts it #18 of the 21 shows we've scored — slotting between Community (77.9) and Taxi (77.4). A lower-table finish for a show whose reputation rests as much on heartbreak as on punchlines, and one worth reading carefully: Futurama has the highest joke density on the entire board at 3.83 jokes per minute. Volume is not what the index rewards.
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 77.8 is a floor, not a ceiling.
The real story: the revival held up
The Hulu revival (2023–2025) holds up far better than revivals usually do — though "statistically indistinguishable," which is what an earlier version of this post claimed, was too strong.
Across the 107 scored episodes of the original run (1999–2013), the show averaged 6.85 craft and 6.57 impact. Across the 30 revival episodes: 6.80 craft and 6.47 impact — a 0.05 gap in craft, a 0.10 gap in impact. Per joke, that is very nearly the same show.
At the episode level the gap is wider: the original run averages 78.6, the revival 75.2, and the middle revival season (73.0) is the weakest Futurama has ever had. So the honest verdict is not "no decline." It is that the revival gave up about three points of Humor Index while holding its per-joke writing quality almost exactly steady — which is still a far better outcome than most revivals manage. The revival's two best episodes score 81.9 and 81.4, landing at ranks 28 and 31 of 137 — upper quartile, comfortably above the series median of 78.1, but not among the show's all-time best.
The single best joke is 24 years old
Of all 8,900 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
137 episodes. Four eras. Twenty-six years. Two networks and a streamer. And across all of it, the per-joke writing quality barely moved — 6.85 craft in the Fox and Comedy Central years, 6.80 in the Hulu return, twenty-four years apart.
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).
Scale note: 14 of our 21 shows have been rescored on the current canonical model. Seven (Friends, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny, Community, Futurama, Taxi and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) are still on the pre-2026 scale and will move when they're rescored. Comparisons that mix the two are flagged where they appear.