Why We Love Futurama Making Us Look Stupid

Part of the charm of Futurama is that it has remained staunchly the same in the face of a more than 20-year timespan between its first episode and now. The show has always referenced current events as a way of making fun of us humans and our faults, and the new seasons on Hulu are no exception. We seem to like it when Futurama points out our weaknesses and makes us look silly.

The new installment of Futurama tackles the popular obsession with NFTs. While proclaiming that NFTs aren’t really digital art, the cast then gets sucked into a scheme to produce some Bender NFTs in order to cash in on his likeness. Meanwhile, Bender mass-produces digital images of himself, while calling buyers suckers, dragging both the buyers as well as the producers of NFTs in the process.

But the Futurama writers aren’t just making fun of us when they write their jokes; they’re making fun of themselves as well, referencing their own history as fodder for jokes as well as AI, binge-watching, and their parent company, Hulu. This might be why we feel so good being made to look stupid by an animated science fiction show, because we’re just glad to be included.

The episode of Futurama featuring a Squid Game parody allows us to examine our fascination with pitting people against each other for entertainment and punishes the cast whether they do the right thing or not.

The set-up involves a grotesquely deformed set of party games set in Fry’s childhood in the 1990s, only to have them end up as pawns for the entertainment of an alien species. We both love and hate to see ourselves through this lens, but we get some satisfaction from seeing our current society reflected back at us from a futuristic perspective.

Rather than commenting much on current events, Futurama just depicts them with some kind of science fiction twist involving aliens, making the scenarios both relatable as well as giving them some cultural distance.

Looking at ourselves this way allows us to see what’s ridiculous about us, and to see how silly our obsessions and customs can be. And for some reason, probably because it’s a very sympathetic approach to pointing out our flaws, we love it.

Futurama gives everyone watching it the opportunity to see ourselves through the eyes of the main characters. Rather than identifying with one specific point of view, our own psyches can be split up into various voices, with Bender being the selfish and ruthless part of us, Fry being the kind but not very bright part of us, and so on.  And that’s why we love it when Futurama makes fun of us, because we can see it as us making fun of ourselves.