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• Early-Bird Cameo: Leela's parents appear in "I Second That Emotion" in the background as the two-nosed mutant is telling the legend of a swamp monster, two seasons before "Leela's Homeworld" where they were formally introduced.
  • An eight-bit rendition of the Planet Express ship appears as the ship that Fry is piloting in an arcade machine called ''Monkey's Fracas, Jr." in the first few minutes of "Space Pilot 3000".
  • The psychic hobo 9 that has an important role in the fourth movie can be seen in a crowd in the first episode of season 2.
  • Blink and you'll miss it, but in "When Aliens Attack," when the camera zooms through the cosmos from Earth to Omicron Perseii 8, it passes by an Earth space probe engulfed in a blue, somewhat sparkly nebula. This is two and a half seasons before "Godfellas."
  • Blink and you'll miss this as well: Nibbler's shadow can be seen in front of Fry just before he gets pushed into the Cryogenic chamber. This is the first five minutes of the pilot, long before "Roswell That Ends Well" and "The Why of Fry". Turns out... IT HAD all been planned from the beginning.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Lots, much like The Simpsons, though the changes are more subtle.
  • Bender sounded more surly and drunken in his earlier episodes.
  • At first, Fry sounded more timid, and the rest of the Planet Express crew sounded more serious.
  • Also, in the pilot episode, it was mentioned that people in the year 3000 were implanted with career chips that permanently assigned them to a job, and if they quit, they would be fired out of a cannon into the sun. While the career chip plot device did creep up once in the series, the element of being fired out a cannon into the sun upon quitting a job was never brought up, as numerous times various members of the Planet Express Crew had walked off the job, disappeared without giving notice, and were fired, and in some cases horribly maimed or killed, only to wind up at the same job they were in at the end of the episode as though nothing had happened.
  • Zoidberg's running gag in the early episodes was that he was an alien doctor who didn't understand human anatomy. In the later episodes, while his medical knowledge is still pretty questionable, the running gag is how much of a poor, desperate, disgusting loser he is. On top of that, he's shown as having teeth in his first few appearances.
  • In the earlier episodes, Professor Farnsworth was actually nice; a little dotty and lazy from old age, but nowhere near as heartless and insane as he would later be. On top of that, Billy West's voice for him was softer, and the episode that introduced Mom of Mom's Friendly Robot Company didn't even mention that Farnsworth and Mom used to be a couple (despite the scene of Mom confronting Fry right at Planet Express, there wasn't so much as a throwaway line about Mom and the Professor).
  • During her introductory episode and most of the first season, it was strongly implied that Amy didn't have any particular talent when it came to science or engineering, and had only been hired because she had the same (implicitly rare) blood type as the Professor. As time went on, she was established as more of a Genius Ditz, who had definite skills and flashes of insight, even if the emphasis was mainly on the "ditz" part. Then again, the second episode (the one where she is introduced) showed Amy mastering the Planet Express ship's controls by playing with a Claw machine, so perhaps she was never as ditzy as she seemed.
  • The earlier episodes were centered on the Planet Express crew going to strange new worlds. The later ones don't have these episodes as often. ^note  The DVD commentary reveals that Fox basically forced them to do episodes that featured space, aliens, new planets, etc. The creators were mainly interested in using the future for satirical purposes.
  • Several episodes in Season 1 had cold openings, which were dropped near the end of that season (though "Brannigan, Begin Again" from season two has the cold opening of Fry and Bender playing a violent, futuristic version of chess).
  • For those who are used to seeing the head of Richard Nixon as Earthican President, "When Aliens Attack" is going to feel weird to watch as it had an Earthican President named MacNeil (whom the Omicronians mistake for Jenny MacNeil from the legal dramedy Single Female Lawyer), though MacNeil's getting shot does set up for the events in "A Head in the Polls".
  • In "Hell is Other Robots", the robot church considers alcohol to be evil, whereas in later episodes it's vital to the working of robots.
  • Fry's crush on Leela was at the most a mild attraction in season 1, as Fry never showed signs of interest when Leela's love life came up, nor did he ever get jealous when Leela slept with Zapp Brannigan or took an interest in a beach bully in When Aliens Attack. Later episodes make him on a full-on Dogged Nice Guy, culminating in a Relationship Upgrade post the series' un-cancellation. ^note  The creators of Futurama have stated that they actually never intended for Fry and Leela to ever get together. They instead intended for it to be simply an unrequited crush on Fry's part and entirely Played for Laughs. They changed their minds when they saw how much fans like the relationship and decided to have Leela fall in love with Fry after all.
  • Fry was more of a slightly dimwitted slacker in the earlier episodes, but as the series progressed, the laziness was phased out while his stupidity was played up more and more.^note  This was stated by the creators to be intentional since most of the humor involving him was supposed to be around his Fish out of Water status concerning the future, but he ended up adapting to the future far quicker than they had intended, forcing them to up his stupidity more to give him a more defined role in the cast..
  • A lot of the early episodes of the series portrayed practically everyone from Fry's time as a colossal Jerkass to downright hilarious levels. The first episode even had Fry celebrating that everyone he knew was dead. Later episodes would flashback to his time and make Fry's family more nuanced and show that they really did care for him deep down, despite their flaws and ways of showing it. Even his employer's outburst at him in the pilot was semi-Retcon'd to be due to the stress of filling orders for New Years' Eve, and shown to be one of the few people who genuinely treated Fry decently. This can make Fry celebrating that everyone he knew was dead rather jarring coming from the later seasons (though in "Game of Tones", he did expressly says that he convinced himself he hated everything about his past life because he knew he could never go back).
  • The DVD Commentary tracks were less elaborate for the first four seasons, usually only having around four-to-five commentators at a time and Matt Groening and David X. Cohen being the only consistent mainstays. Starting with Season 5, each track now has at least eight commentators, and Billy West and John DiMaggio are both present in almost every track (previously, they alternated tracks) alongside the aforementioned Groening and Cohen.
• Ear Trumpet: When Fry travels in time and accidentally has sex with his grandmother when she was younger; upon having it spelled out for him she responds to his screams with "What was that dear?" and uses an ear horn.
• Earth All Along:
  • A subtle example appears in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" when Zapp tricks Leela into thinking that Earth was destroyed and they're the last Earthicans left alive... and stranded on a suspiciously Earthlike planet.
  • Parodied in "The Late Phillip J. Fry" where they find the Statue of Liberty blown up... then an ape Statue of Liberty... then a bird one... then a cow... then a slug maybe?
  • Inverted in the episode when Fry thought he'd gotten stuck in another cryogenic capsule for another thousand years, only to learn that the "post-apocalyptic wasteland" wasn't a (more) far-future Earth, but Los Angeles in Leela's time.
• Easy Amnesia: "Bender Should Not be Allowed on Television" parodies this with All My Circuits, which features a montage of the cast getting amnesia and Calculon lampshading it at the end.
• Easy Road to Hell:
  • There's one robot church that has an easy condemnation to Robot Hell for robots. According to his agreement with his new church, all Bender has to do is sin once to be dragged off to Robot Hell.
  • Robot Santa's naughty setting kind of falls under this trope. He condemns Scruffy to the naughty/death list just for picking his nose. Apparently Zoidberg is the only one who meets his standards (that year).
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: After Lrrr accidentally conquers Earth, the next thing we see is the main cast sentenced to the mines to supply his wife with gemstones to eat.
• Eaten Alive: Justified examples in "Naturama" (it's nature red in tooth and claw and such after all).
  • Free Waterfall, Jr.'s fate in "The Problem with Popplers" episode, at the hands (jaws?) of Lrrr.
  • Also, the intro to "Bender's Game", even if it is stylized as a Beatle-esque drug trip.
• Eats Babies: The Poppler episode.
• Eccentric A.I.: To make an exhaustive list of all the eccentric robots in this show would take longer than Fry's time as a Human Popsicle. Some notable examples include:
  • Malfunctioning Eddy, a car-dealing robot who will explode for nearly all pieces of information he's fed.
  • The Planet Express autopilot, which becomes a hyper-obsessive stalker for Bender.
  • Project Satan, who was built from the evilest vehicle parts of all time and creates were-cars.
  • Various robots sentenced to a robot mental asylum, including an Abraham Lincoln animatronic that developed 200 Split Personalities, each of which is a different version of Lincoln.
  • Roberto, a homicidal friend of Bender's who tends to take hostages and/or stab people wherever he goes.
• Elderly Ailment Rambling: Professor Farnsworth, who's a man of 160, has a tendency to talk about his medical conditions:
  • In "Mother's Day", he casually mentions that the time his ex-girlfriend (a psycho woman known as "Mom") "broke his heart" was "four or five hearts ago", implying he's had replacement hearts.
  • In one episode, he's telling a story about the past and mentions that he had diarrhea back then even though it's completely unrelated to the matter at hand.
  • In "I Second That Emotion", when Nibbler is flushed down the toilet and everyone thinks he died, Farnsworth's eulogy for him is that he's "gone to a place where I too hope one day to go: the toilet" (implying he's constipated or incontinent).
  • In "That's Lobstertainment!", the Professor mentions that he's been a fan of Harold Zoid since back when his hips were made of bone.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Yivo's something between this and a Genius Loci. It ("Schle"?) is sentient and has enough area to store everyone in the entire universe, but Yivo is also very personable and tries to interact with our universe without dragging everyone to itself ("schlimself"?) first. Unfortunately, that first interaction counted as mating with every organism in our universe, which Yivo blames on our universe "dressing provocatively", but this gets handwaved. Yivo's also, for all intents and purposes, a living Fluffy Cloud Heaven.
• Election Day Episode: In the episode "A Head in the Polls", Richard Nixon runs for Earth President using a robot body (initially Bender's) and wins. "Decision 3012" is about another Earth President election, this time with Nixon running against a competent candidate of mysterious origins.
• Emergency Presidential Address: This tends to happen in Futurama all the time, which shouldn't be surprising given the number of world/universe ending calamities that need averting.
• Endless Daytime: The planet that cats originally came from doesn't turn, so they have perpetual night and day for different sides of the planet. They come to Earth to steal its rotational energy, resulting in the same situation for Earth.
• Enemy Mine: Bender's Big Score has everyone forced to evacuate Earth to other planets by the scammer aliens, with the main characters taking up residence on Neptune. Unfortunately, they forget that Robot Santa is based there. It turns out that he's also been scammed, and Leela "convinces" him and his fellow holiday mascots to join forces and take out the scammers.
• Enfant Terrible: Tonya in “Stench and Stenchibility” is revealed to be this.
• Enhance Button:
  • Lampshaded in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela".
    Kif: That's all the resolution we have. Making it bigger doesn't make it clearer.
    Zap: It does on CSI: Miami.
  • In "Law and Oracle" the Minority Report-style prediction videos can be enhanced by doing a binocular-focusing hand-gesture.
• Enormous Engagement Ring: In The Beast with a Billion Backs, Yivo proposes to the universe with one of these ultra-large rings.
• Ensemble Cast: They've had a few, such as "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", "Three Hundred Big Boys", and "The Prisoner of Benda".
  • The Comedy Central-Era seasons in particular tended to focus on the entire crew in general.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: After Bender has a nightmare:
  Bender: What an awful dream! 1s and 0s everywhere! [shudder] And I thought I saw a 2.
  Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as 2.
• Establishing Character Moment: Bender's alcoholism and tendencies to steal were established, in a few seconds (After seeming to "join in" on the emotional moment by putting his hand on top of Leela's, and, when he pulls it back, the ring is gone. Leela swiftly accuses him of stealing the ring, to which he admits he stole and then returns it, declaring "and now the mystery of the stolen ring has been solved! Let's have a drink!", pulling out three large beer bottles and then guzzling all three down at one time) in "Space Pilot 3000".
  • This is AFTER he receives a massive shock in the same episode, before that he refused to do anything that contradicted his basic programming as a factory worker
  • It's also after his kleptomania is established in the Suicide Booth scene, where the does the Coin-on-a-String Trick - he's such a kleptomaniac, he's compelled to steal his own suicide.
• Eternal English:
  • Played straight. In the year 3000, there are only a few notable language changes. "Ask" is now always pronounced "axe" (except when the writers forget it), and not just by African-Americans, and "X-mas" is actually pronounced as "ecksmass". Also, people still speak modern English in the year 50 million.
  • Meanwhile, French is an incomprehensible dead language.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Robot Devil may be the embodiment of all that is evil, but Bender is worse, as seen in The Beast with a Billion Backs, where he reunites with his long-lost first-born son, then brings him to hell, and punts him through the Robot Devil's office into a vat of magma.
  Robot Devil: Wow! That was pretty brutal, even by my standards.
  Bender: No backsies.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Every short story in the Christmas special ends like this.
• Everyone Meets Everyone: Twice in a row: Fry, Leela, Bender and Farnsworth meet each other in the pilot; the first three meet Hermes, Amy and Dr. Zoidberg in the second episode.
• Evil Feels Good: Bender does this a lot. He seems aware that stealing is bad, but he sure enjoys it.
• Evil Living Flames: "The Inhuman Torch" features one of these as the main villain. It's an extraterrestrial being of pure solar energy named Flamo, whom the Planet Express crew accidentally brings back to Earth after a visit to a helium mining facility on the sun and who spends the episode trying to turn the Earth into a new, incandescent sun for him to rule over. In the newest season, Zapp uses Kif like a hose to put another living flame out (leading Kif to finally file a complaint against his captain).
• Evil Old Folks: Mom. Professor Farnsworth had a tendency to fall in love with her and leave her (again) when he discovered new depths to her evil. This happened several times.
• Evil Twin:
  • In "Lesser of Two Evils", Flexo is considered Bender's Evil Twin (he has a goatee!). The trope is subverted is at the end of the episode, when it turns out that Bender is the Evil Bender.
    Fry: You mean Bender is the evil Bender? I'm shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
  • Another episode parodies the Mirror Universe style of Evil Twin.
    "You mean somewhere there's a more evil Bender than me? I do my best, dammit!
• Exact Words: Invoked. The Constitution says that nobody can be elected president twice. Exactly, "No body", but Richard Nixon is just a head in a robot body.
  • To allow Bender to escape Hell, Leela has to "defeat the Robot Devil in a fiddle contest". Nothing in the rules about her doing so by being a better fiddle player. She merely bashes him upside the head with the solid gold fiddle, enabling them all to escape. May also double as Fridge Brilliance.
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: It's always 1000 years into the future.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: In one episode Professor Farnsworth has an angry dome for pacing back and forth, muttering in Angrish.
• Exotic Entree: Just to show how messed up the future is, some animals not considered food today are eaten regularly, like parrots. Not dolphins though, unless they blow all their money on instant lottery tickets, then it's okay.
• Exposition Already Covered: In Season 4 "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", when the Planet Express Crew are searching for the Fountain of Aging, Farnsworth and Leela notice everything in the solar system they're currently in is getting older the closer they get to an ancient, burnt-out sun. Before Farnsworth could state the Fountain of Aging is located on the burnt-out sun, Leela beats him to it, which angers him.
  Farnsworth: News flash! Everything's getting older the closer we get to that ancient, burnt-out sun.
  Leela: Dude, the Fountain of Aging must be on the sun itself.
  Farnsworth: Shut up! I was gonna say that!
• Expository Theme Tune: Parodied with the New Justice Team.
• Extinct in the Future: Pine trees, poodles, cows, the common cold, and anchovies are all extinct by the year 3000.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: Fry is initially dazzled by the New New York of 3000 A.D. after being frozen for 1,000 years. However, he becomes more blase about the setting as he finds he still has to do the same things he did back in 1999 like earn money, get a job, find a place to live, and pay taxes.
• Extreme Omnivore: Zoidberg, Nibbler, and numerous other aliens.
• Eye Scream:
  • The eyePhones are - you guessed it - inserted directly into the eyes.
  • A Martian Muck Leech attaches itself to Leela's eye in the fourth movie.
    • Leela's eye is apparently not as sensitive to the touch as regular human eyes; she can caress it.
  • Bender's eye is drilled into in the third movie.

F

• F--: Parodied by Doctor Wernstrom.
  Wernstrom: I give your invention the worst grade imaginable: an A-minus-minus!
• The Faceless: Leela's ex-boyfriend Sean is alluded to multiple times across the show's run but is never actually seen (although he is described) until the episode "Fry and Leela's Big Fling."
• Fake Danger Gambit: In the episode "When Aliens Attack", Fry and Leela are on the beach when a muscular, handsome man flirts with Leela. He explains to Fry that he's a professional beach bully who steals the girlfriend of some weak guy, then goes down in one punch to make the weak guy look good in front of his girl, for a price. Fry says that Leela isn't his girlfriend so the bully is free to date her if he wants, but he says he's actually gay and walks away.
• Fake Identity Baggage: In ''The Prisoner of Benda'', Bender uses the Professor's mind-swapping machine to take over the body of visiting Robo-Hungarian Emperor Nikolai and steal his crown jewels. While Bender enjoys the luxuries of Nikolai's yacht, Nikolai's fiancée Flavia and cousin Basil reveal that they've been having an affair and are planning to assassinate Nikolai. Bender tries to save himself by revealing that he's not really Nikolai, but all that matters to them is that Nikolai's body is dead, not who's inside it.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: At the end of "Put Your Head on My Shoulder":
  Fry: Listen, Leela. Thanks for rescuing me last night.
  Leela: Anytime. I actually enjoyed hanging out with you.
  Bender: Yep, everything worked out great thanks to good old Bender.
  Leela: Come on! It's not like you intentionally set us up with bad dates so we'd spend Valentine's Day together.
  Bender: Didn't I, Leela? Didn't I? (winks)
  (Iris Out)
  Leela: No, you didn't! You just rounded up a bunch of stiffs at the bus station and pocketed all our money!
• Fake-Out Make-Out: Done between Fry and Leela in "A Flight to Remember" in order to convince Zapp Brannigan that Leela was taken
• False Teeth Tomfoolery:
  • Farnsworth turns out to have nuclear-powered dentures in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", which go crazy after biting Fry's finger and therefore acquiring a taste for human blood.
  • "The Six Million Dollar Mon" has a bit where Farnsworth loses his false teeth in the sink and doesn't get them back until Hermes has his arm replaced with a robotic prosthetic that can extend long enough to reach into the garbage disposal. Farnsworth is grateful even though his dentures are put in his mouth sideways.
  • A throwaway line in "Game of Tones" implies that Fry's ex-girlfriend Michelle uses dentures.
• Fan Disservice:
  • The ancient Professor and fat Hermes often get naked or dressed in skimpy clothes for little to no reason, aside from the future having left behind such primitive concepts as "modesty". Also, we really didn't need to see Brannigan as the Adam figure in the second 2010 episode. Augh. Also, Mom and the Professor on "Mother's Day."
    Fry: Nothing in here but a couple of elephant skin rugs. [beat] Eeew!
    Farnsworth: Oh yes.
  • Leela and Fry making out in the bodies of Zoidberg and Professor Farnsworth on "Prisoner of Benda." Good God!.
  • The second part of the Girly Calendar on "Neutopia". It starts out nice (Female Fry), then rapidly becomes very disturbing (Female Zoidberg).
  • The Nudist aliens. Especially when they exercise the Power Perversion Potential of time travel. Urhuurgh.
• Fantastically Challenging Patient: Inverted. Dr. Zoidberg is a Decapodian with Bizarre Alien Biology who mostly operates on humans. Most of his operations result in Anatomically Ignorant Healing.
  • His introductory scene of giving Fry a checkup shows that he has no idea what a Human is.
    Zoidberg: Alright, open your mouth and say "ah". No, no, your other mouth.
    Fry: I only have one.
    Zoidberg: Really?
  • Zoidberg's practices have become so infamous among the medical community that other doctors refer to him as a verb.
    Doctor: Man, the guy who did this must have been a real Zoidberg.
    Hermes: It was Zoidberg!
  • The DVD Commentary outright says the idea with Zoidberg was to invert the dynamic between Dr. McCoy and Spock (with a human doctor treating an alien whose biology he didn't understand).
• Fanservice:
  • In "Jurassic Bark", Fry walks in on Leela and Amy wrestling in revealing outfits for no discernible reason (Leela claims, "We need to practice hand-to-hand combat in case an enemy knocks the laser gun out of our hands and they slide way across the room."), but Fry is too busy prepping for the cloning of his dog to care about seeing a girl-on-girl fight.
    • Shortly afterward, Leela declares that Bender has been down in the lava too long and she is going in after him. She starts to tear off her skimpy outfit (revealing some underboob) but is stopped by Professor Farnsworth who angrily reminds her that lava is hot. The DVD Commentary says they pushed it as far as they could.
  • "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" has Fry accidentally going into the women's steam room, where Leela and Amy are relaxing naked. Amy moves the hand covering her chest, but just enough to keep it still covered (according to the DVD commentary, the writers used this scene as a bargaining chip for the FOX censors when they wanted to get away with something that the censors would immediately decline, telling them "You let us get away with this. Why can't you do the same with this scene?").
    Fry: Co-ed steam rooms? I love the future!
    Leela: Fry, you're in the women's steam room.
    Fry: Futuristic.
    Amy [aside to Leela]: Psst! Look what life was like before genetic engineering.
    Leela: Those poor 20th-century women.
    [Fry swings his legs closed]
  • In "Parasites Lost", the one in which Fry is infested with worms that make him smart, there are two fanservice scenes. One is of Fry, buffed up by the worms, ripping his shirt off. Another involves Leela sleeping in a VERY skimpy nightie as she waits for Fry to return.
  • Leela as Clobberella in "Less Than Hero". Boy, is she sexy in that uniform and domino mask, and with her hair down. Lampshaded by her parents, who ask if she had to make the costume so revealing.
    • For added points, there's the scene where she tells her parents about being a superhero: she tears off her clothes showing the Clobberella uniform underneath!
    • And tears up the uniform again to change back.
      Leela: It was brisk. I dressed in layers.
  • In "A Taste of Freedom", the whole crew takes a nude bath in a hot tub to celebrate Freedom Day.
  • There is a nude conga line in "Time Keeps on Slipping":
    Hermes: I don' know why I t'ought this would work.
  • The straight-to-DVD movies kick it up a notch. The first one begins with a visit to the "Nude Beach Planet." In nonsexual fanservice, all the Continuity Nods qualify.
    • Additionally, a huge part of the first movie's plot revolves around Fry's ass, which is frequently bare in order to access the Time Code tattoo.
  • In the second movie, Amy's bride outfit for the Fon Fon Rubok ceremony and, after, the funeral outfit◊. And she was the WIDOW!
  • Amy and Leela hug near the end of the third movie and then make out for a little while for no good reason.
  • The scene in "Rebirth" when Amy and Leela are ejected from the Stem Cell Tub may count.
  • The episode "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" has Leela wearing nothing but leaves to cover her naughty parts, eventually: at first, she's covering her boobs with her hands, and not covering her front-parts with anything. Seriously, they might as well have inked in a little purple landing strip.
  • In "Neutopia", most of the first calendar shoot with Leela, Amy and La Barbara. Particularly when Leela is wearing nothing on her upper body except suspenders. HOW DID THEY GET AWAY WITH THAT?
  • In "All the Presidents' Heads" we see Amy as if the British had won the Revolution. Needless to say, God Save◊ the Queen◊.
  • In "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences", after Lrr's (staged) takeover of Earth, he and Ndnd are taking in a theatrical performance in which Calculon, the Professor and Leela are forced to fight a tentacled monster. Leela's outfit is pretty fanservice-y.
  • Leela and Amy's skimpy Butterfly Derby outfits◊ in "The Butterjunk Effect".
  • Leela and Amy showering together in "The Six Million Dollar Mon". Leela pleads with Fry to rub her new scented body oil on Amy and herself, but Fry is too busy trying to eavesdrop on a conversation between Hermes and Bender.
  • "Stench and Stenchability" has Amy in a nurse's outfit, complete with ass cleavage.
• Fantastic Ghetto:
  • Mutants (except for Leela, who pretends to be an alien) are legally required to live in the sewers underground. This changes in the season 6 episode (also the 100th episode) "The Mutants Are Revolting."
  • After the Native Martians sold their entire planet's surface to humans they were required to live underground. This is resolved when they discover that they sold their land for a colossal gem worth a lot of money, at which point they promptly dump Mars and just buy a new planet.
  • New New York also has Little Bitaly and Little Neptune, ethnic areas for robots and Neptunian aliens respectively, although these are more along the lines of immigrant neighborhoods in the last century than anything.
• Fantastic Livestock: By the 31st century, cattle are extinct and have been replaced by giant black-and-white spotted beetles called buggalo (at least on Mars).
• Fantastic Racism: Played for laughs with the robots, sorry..."Electronic-Americans". In the future, robots have personalities indistinguishable from humans, attend learning intuitions, and have voting privileges (There was even a robot president, John Quincy Adding Machine). However, robots are still machines that are built and destroyed at the discretion of humans and ordered to perform unpleasant tasks. This causes friction in a few episodes.
  • In "Fear of a Bot Planet", Bender complains that humans are afraid to let robots play in the same sports league as humans, leading Leela to point out that robot league pitchers are just modified artillery launchers, making this a Justified Trope.
  • In "Free Will Hunting", a robot judge is offended when a lawyer, trying to get Bender off for yet another crime, says that Bender, as a robot, has no free will, and therefore cannot be held accountable for his actions. The judge starts off condemning this defense, but his programming takes over and delivers the verdict independently of his objections.
  • In "A Head in the Polls", the collapse of a titanium mine on Saturn’s moon (Titan) traps a thousand robot workers underground. The rescue plan, in its entirety, is to pave over the area.
  • In "The Beast with a Billion Backs", Farnsworth and Wernstrom blithely toss tiny robots at the electromatter experiment to watch them explode: "Playtime is funtime!"
  • In "Ghost in the Machines", Bender is mad at Fry for saving a human’s life at the expense of a robot’s life. To which Fry points out that “A human’s life is worth more than a robot’s life.”
• Fantastic Religious Weirdness:
  • Zoidberg is both stereotypically Jewish and a non-kosher shellfish. Not that there's a rule against being a shellfish, and if anything it's even more of a reason not to eat them. After all, Human meat is as kosher as pork and shellfish. (The latter is, however, directly banned by Book Leviticus.) In any case, he does eat a sea creature at his old scuttling ground. "Who's laughing NOW Vinnie?" (This was a different kind of crustacean, which is why it was small enough for Zoidberg to pick up, even though it bullied Zoidberg as a kid.)
  • Another example of this trope is the above mentioned confusion surrounding the the specifics of robot religion. Fry sneaks into the reception for BOT Mitzvah (does this mean robots are circumcised?), while Bender falls under the spell of Preacherbot and the Church of Robotology, which rejects robosexuality.
  • Fry briefly consulted Father Changstein el-Gamal of the First Amalgamated Church, which features elements of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Atheism, or at least Agnosticism. And when someone asks whether the Space Pope is reptilian, he means "Yes".
  • "Oh, why couldn't he have joined one of the mainstream religions? Like Oprahism, or Voodoo?"
• Fantastic Underclass: Mutants (except for Leela, who pretends to be an alien) are not even granted a semblance of citizenship on Earth, and are legally required to live in the sewers.
• Fantastic Vermin: By the year 3000, owls have supplanted pigeons as New New York's standard flying vermin. Golden marmosets are also mentioned as unremarkable urban wildlife.
  Hermes: Concerning our pest problem: somebody's been leaving food around, and it's attracting owls! And I, for one, am getting tired of cleaning those owl traps. [Trap snaps, an owl hoots]
  Igner: We're owl exterminators! (repeated throughout "Bender's Game")
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: Parasites Lost: The crew shrinks down to rid Fry of parasites, travelling through the ear, nose, heart, stomach, and intestines as they do so.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • Done purposefully by a group of colonists; they modeled the planet after Ancient Egypt. Apparently, the ancient Egyptians taught them about space travel.
  • An in-universe equivalent can be found in Cornwood from the third movie: a literal Fantasy Counterpart Culture.
• Fantasy Landmark Equivalent: In the intro, New New York has the Statue of Liberty holding a Ray Gun.
• Fat Bastard:
  • Mayor C. Randall Poopenmeyer is a bit pudgy and far from being a good person.
  • Zapp Brannigan has a prominent gut (even though he tries to hide it with a girdle), and is consistently shown to be sexist, perverted, cowardly and self-serving.
  • Sal is a recurring character who is rather stocky and generally shown to be rude and pervy.
  • The Donbot is a rotund robot gangster.
  • "Less Than Hero" has Fry, Leela and Bender face a chubby supervillain known as the Zookeeper.
  • All of the nudist alien scammers who serve as the antagonists of Bender's Big Score have paunches, but Schlump is noticeably the fattest of the three.
  • Ndnd nags Lrrr about his weight all the time.
• Fearful Symmetry: The "perfectly symmetrical violence" between the two Leelas in "The Farnsworth Parabox".
• Feminine Leg Swish: Invoked. Bender, during a stint as a pro wrestler, is forced to play the part of "The Gender Bender", laying in a bed wearing a tutu and a wig, saying in an effeminate voice, "I'm a tuffy", while swishing his legs back and forth.
• Feudal Future: One of the futures that flashes by a frozen Fry in "Space Pilot 3000" is a civilization that resembles feudal times... until it's destroyed by "space aliens".
• Fever Dream Episode ("The Sting")
• Fiction 500: The Wong family and Mom.
• Fictional Color: Once made mention of a color called Blurple. Oh, and there was also Fry's description of an amazing, indescribable thing he saw that day at the beginning of I Dated a Robot:
  Fry: I just saw something incredibly cool. A big floating ball that lit up with every color of the rainbow, plus some new ones that were so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried.
  Amy: Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?
  Fry: [hesitantly] Yeah.
  Amy: They have a college kid wear that to attract customers.
  • In a Black and White episode Fry's over-sized diamond ring creates a rainbow that combined with the shards of other diamonds created a brand-new color which was "in no way a combination of different colors". All we saw was a slightly different shade of grey.
• Fictional Flag: There are at least two fictional flags; the "Earth Flag", which resembles the flag of the United States with an image of planet Earth in the canton, and the "Decapodian Flag", which has an image of a hammer being held in a lobster claw.
• Fictional Holiday: Freedom Day.
• Fictional Political Party: The one world government on Earth is run by a slew of these, most of which are puns based on the names of real parties and lobbyist groups in American politics. These include The Antisocialists, the National Raygun Association, and the Green Party (whose members are, literally, green), among others. Republican and Democratic parties are known as the Fingerlicans and the Tastycrats.
• Fictional United Nations: The Democratic Order of Planets, or DOOP, which Hermes identifies as being analogous to the Federation of Planets from Star Trek. In practice however, it appears to be closer in function to the modern United Nations: an international (or rather, interplanetary) forum for mediating disputes and cooperating on greater-scope issues, with each member retaining unilateral sovereignty.
• Finish Him!: In "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love", Fry dramatically refuses to kill his friend, and Zoidberg takes the opportunity to chop off his arm.
  Fry: [Beat as he stares at the stump of his arm before he flies into a rage and starts slapping Zoidberg with his own severed limb] You bastard! I'll kill you! You bastard!
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: With robots. And singing!
• First Law of Gender Bending: Appears to occur in the episode "Neutopia" to Scruffy, as he is in the bathroom when everybody else is returned to their normal gender. However, this is actually subverted, as in the next episode "Benderama", Scruffy is seen returned to normal.
• First-Person Dying Perspective: "Love's Labours Lost In Space": When Leela and Fry rescue animals from the soon-to-collapse planet Vergon 6, one of the animals threatens a smaller one, later known as "Nibbler". Nibbler quickly makes work of it by swallowing it whole, with the last thing it sees being the inside of Nibbler's mouth.
• First-Step Fixation: In one episode, Bender winds up on a small planetoid and needs to jump over a ravine. He backs up so he can get a running start—and keeps backing up until he's circumnavigated the planetoid and winds up at the spot where he was trying to jump to in the first place. Then he runs and jumps over the ravine anyway.
• Fishing for Sole: In "The Deep South", after the crew receive a mandatory fishing license instead of a pet license for Nibbler, they head out to fish. Bender and Fry begin one-upping each other over past fish caught, while Leela busts out her harpoon to top them both. Unfortunately, the first thing she actually harpoons out of the ocean is a boot. Moments later she harpoons a crate of ten pairs of boots.
  Amy: Oh, so this is where you shop for your boots!
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Fry, of course, and "The Cryonic Woman" mildly deconstructed the concept via his ex-girlfriend, Michelle.
• Five-Finger Fillet: Roberto plays a game of this in "How the West Was 1010001," but instead of stabbing the space between his fingers with a knife, he uses a revolver that fires knives to shoot between his fingers.
• Fixing the Game: Bender doesn't just cheat. He doesn't just like cheating. He has a cheating unit, that occasionally malfunctions.
• Flashback B-Plot: A couple of episodes focus on a story taking place in the 30th century while also following a story from Fry's life in the 20th century.
• Flat "What":
  Fembot: Have you any idea how it feels to be a fembot living in a manbot's manputer's world?
  Bender: ...What?
• Fleeting Demographic Rule: In The Simpsons season 5 episode "$pringfield (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)", Barney mistakes a cup of quarters for a cup of beer and ends up swallowing a bunch. As he starts burping them out, one of the patrons nearby says, "Hey, this guy's paying off!" Barney is then surrounded by gamblers picking up the quarters as he keeps burping. This episode aired in 1993. Cut to 2012. After Futurama is Uncancelled, there's the season 7 episode "Viva Mars Vegas". The Planet Express crew steals a bunch of money from a casino taken over by the Robot Mafia by having Zoidberg eat everything in the vault, as he's currently invisible. When the crew attempts to wheel Zoidberg out of the casino on a shrimp serving cart, he starts burping out dollar bills. And just like in "$pringfield", a bystander shouts "Look! The shrimp cart's paying out!" before a horde of gamblers follow after it to pick up the bills. In essence, they reused a joke nineteen years later.
• Flintstone Theming: With a new theme Once an Episode.
• Flipping Helpless: On the episode "Crimes of the Hot", Bender rescues a turtle because he feels a kinship with it, because he too can't get up when laid on his back. (He claims that all those times he got up from his back he was actually slightly on his side.) At the climax, when all the robots have to vent their emissions upward to save themselves, Bender and the turtle are on their backs, unable to get up. Then the turtle manages to flip over, which gives Bender the incentive to do the same.
• Flipping the Bird:
  • In the episode "That's Lobstertainment!", when Zoidberg points out that Bender said "wink, wink" out loud, Bender replies, "No, I didn't. Raise middle finger."
  • In the final scene of "Law and Oracle", Bender can be seen flipping off Fry at one point.
  • In the episode "Benderama", this exchange takes place when Scruffy serves a bowl of soup to Professor Farnsworth:
  Farnsworth: Scruffy, what is that tiny Bender doing in my soup?!
  Scruffy: It appears to be giving you the finger, sir. Enjoy.
  • Implied in the episode "Overclockwise", where Bender responds to being told that a video game console uses motion capture technology by raising his hand and saying "Oh, yeah? Track this motion." The gesture isn't seen, but anyone watching can tell that Bender was giving the bird.
  • In "31st Century Fox", Fry knows a random object on the ground is Bender's middle finger because "[he'd] recognize it anywhere".
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: Fry's intestinal parasites improving his body and mind to near superhuman levels, then revert when he kicks them out. This also gets touched on (in reverse) with Nibbler in "Parasites Regained".
• Fluffy Tamer: Lrrr and Ndnd towards Bigfoot in "Spanish Fry."
• Fluffy the Terrible: Langdon Cobb calls his ego in the form of a giant fungus/guard dog "Pookie".
• Flying Car: The default mode of transport in the 31st century, outside of the mass-transit people tubes. Even though there are plenty of wheels in evidence, the idea of attaching them to some seats to create a ground transport is apparently Lost Technology. In "Mother's Day" Fry literally reinvents the wheel to build a cart, and in "Game of Tones" Hermes describes a 1999 taxi as a "non-hovering hover-car."
• Foot Focus: Several episodes, perhaps most notably "Fun on a Bun" when Leela uses her foot to dip and then eat a tortilla chip, then brushes her ponytail with it.
• Forbidden Holiday: Although is celebrated In-Universe, Christmas is far from the real meaning of Christmas, especially for Fry, who criticizes the way "Xmas" is celebrated in 3000 AD. This is mostly because Robot Santa goes all around the city on Xmas Eve maiming and/or killing anyone on the street on that date... and sometimes, he gets into houses to attack random people.
• Foreign Wrestling Heel: When Bender joins the "Ultimate Robot Fighting League", he's shown as an All-American Face squaring off against a montage of stock Heel characters. One such is named "The Foreigner." His antagonizing of the crowd?
  "I'm not from here! I have my own customs!! Look at my crazy passport!!!"
• Foreshadowing:
  • Nibbler's eyestalk appears in a dust basket in a flashback to Fry's freezing in the Seymour episode.
  • You can also see it during the same scene in the very first episode.
  • Planet Express is also seen being built during the Time-Passes Montage in the first episode.
    • Nibbler's shadow also appears for a brief second the moment Fry falls back into the cryogenic chamber.
    • This gets worked even harder in season 5. During "Jurassic Bark" we once again see the scene. However, for observant viewers, this time there are two silhouettes seen when Fry falls into the chamber. This sets up "The Why of Fry" a few episodes later, which reveals both Nibbler and a Fry who was sent back in time were under the table, and it's Fry himself who sends his past self into the chamber.
  • The first allusion to Leela not being an alien happens in "Fear of a Bot Planet". When Fry and Leela are on trial for being humans in the human-hating robot planet, she tries to defend herself claiming she is an alien. The Robot Mayor quickly shoots her down shouting "Quiet, human!", but at the time it passed as just one more joke on how blind by anger the robots were, ignoring her claims entirely.
  • Leela's parents can be seen in a crowd shot in "I Second That Emotion" long before they're introduced.
  • In the episode "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", Bender's reboot system identifies Leela's species as "human", foreshadowing the subsequent reveal of her being a mutant rather than an alien.
  • Fry's brain slug starves to death. This may seem like a regular joke (alluding to Fry's lack of intellect), until you find out that Fry's brain lacks the delta brain wave.
  • French becoming a dead language was foreshadowed, or possibly a continuity nod, in the very first episode.
  • In "Rebirth", Bender, needing a new power supply post-rebirth, is implanted with a doomsday device to power him, but the device generates excess power which causes him to vibrate if he doesn't burn it off by partying. The first time he starts vibrating, you can see one of his eyes starting to get shaken loose. In the climax of the episode, Bender, refusing to party anymore, starts vibrating again, his eye falls out, and the cyclops-eating monster from earlier in the episode mistakes him for a cyclops and eats him... then the doomsday device goes off inside the monster, killing it and resolving Bender's excess energy problem.
  • When Fry applies a magnet to Bender's head in "The Series Has Landed", Bender howls like a wolf - a nod forward to his becoming a werecar in "The Honking".
  • In "The Luck of the Fryrish", father Fry says "Son, your name is Yancy, just like me and my grandfather and so on", without mentioning his father. In the subsequent season, it is revealed that his father's name was not Yancy because Philip traveled back in time and became his own grandfather.
    • "And so on" means "every two generations", i.e. father Fry, his grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, .... Of course, they are all called Yancy: they are all the same person.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • "Naturama" casts all the characters as animals in a nature documentary.
  • "Reincarnation" shows Futurama animated in different styles (1930s rubber-hose cartoon a la Fleischer Studios, 1980s 8-bit video game, and late-1960s Japanese cartoon a la Speed Racer).
  • The "Anthology of Interest" episodes, which were set up like the Treehouse of Horror episodes from The Simpsons, only with a framing device used in each episode.
  • "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" also shows Futurama as different animation styles. The cartoons parodied are American-based (Scooby Doo, G.I. Joe, and Strawberry Shortcake) and, as with the "Anthology of Interest" episodes, there is a framing device. It involves Richard Nixon and The Headless Body of Agnew watching TV instead of dealing with protesters outside the White House.
  • "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular": A December holiday episode that's shown in three parts with no framing device.
• Four-Fingered Hands: The humans, anyway.
• Fourth Reich: In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", in a sequence showing how the Star Trek fandom grew out of hand in the future, we see that the Trekkies had taken over Germany and rechristened it "Nazi-Planet-Episode Land".
• Franken-vehicle:
  • "The Honking": "Project Satan" was an attempt to build the evilest car ever from pieces of other evil cars. The first car the project created included the steering wheel from Adolf Hitler's Mercedes-Benz limo, the left turn signal from Charles Manson's Volkswagen van, the windshield wipers from the Pontiac that played KITT in Knight Rider, and the electric motor from Ed Begley Jr.'s car.
  • "Where No Fan Has Gone Before": The Planet Express crew are stranded on a planet with the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series. After learning that the former group's ship has broken engines but a working life support system while the latter ship has the opposite, Leela attaches the engines of the Star Trek group's ship to the Planet Express ship to get off the planet.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: "A Prisoner of Benda" takes this trope and runs across the border with it, refusing to come back until extradited for its various crimes. They set up a rule that two bodies can only switch minds once, and then proceeded to work out whether they could eventually restore everyone's original bodies via group-theory. The episode contains a 3-second shot of nothing but Farnsworth's laser-blackboard showing the new, completely original theorem proved just for this episode. And they said abstract math doesn't have any real-world applications.
• Free Wheel: Parodied — the wheel is coming from an exploding spaceship.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The opening credits show some of the Planet Express characters zooming through the people transport tubes, notably Amy, Hermes, and Zoidberg.
• Friendly Sniper: As of "The Tip of the Zoidberg", Zoidberg, of all people, is revealed to be one, or at least capable enough to put three shots into a body with a fairly tight grouping.
• Full-Frontal Assault: In "Children of a Lesser Bog", Kif Kroker strips naked before rescuing Zapp Brannigan from some giant tardigrades, mainly to ensure the effectiveness of his camouflage ability.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral". Bender's "funeral" in "A Pharaoh to Remember."
  Bender: LOUDER AND SADDER!!!!!!!
  • Or:
    Bender: You people have convinced me to live, but only by showing me how boring my funeral would be!
• Fun with Acronyms: Fathers Against Rude Television was a group made by Farnsworth and Hermes in response to Bender's decadence when he starred on All My Circuits in "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on Television".
  • There's also Mankind for Ethical Animal Treatment, an Animal Wrongs Group.
  • Also, the Democratic Order of Planets, an intergalactic counterpart to the UN.
    Fry: DOOP? What's that?
    Farnsworth:It's similar to the United Nations from your time, Fry.
    Fry: Uh...
    Hermes: Or like the Federation from your "Star Trek" programme.
    Fry: Oh!
  • On "Saturday Morning Fun Pit," G.I. Zapp's enemies are part of a terrorist group called A.C.R.O.N.Y.M (A Criminal Regiment of Nasty Young Men)
    Richard Nixon's Head: Oh that's clever. I'll leave that the way it is.
  • In "31st Century Fox", Bender's robot animal rights group is called Bender's Animal Robot Front.
• Fun with Flushing: Bender finally gets fed up with (or more accurately, jealous of) Nibbler and flushes him down the toilet. This prompts them to install a chip that forces him to feel Leela's emotions, causing him to flush himself (in pieces) so he can rescue Nibbler.
  • This comes after Bender realizes that he is too big to go down the drain as one piece:
    Bender: What do these humans use this for?
• Funny Background Event: Near the end of "Bend Her", when showing the Calculon film about the story of Coilette, Preacherbot can be seen in the background of the picture waving to the camera.
• Funny Octopus: Zoidberg has cephalopodian features, such as his facial tentacles and ink-producing abilities. And his younger stages include a cuttlefish-like form (as well as a bivalve, a hydra, a sponge, and just about every other kind of aquatic invertebrate).
• Fur Bikini: Standard wear on the Amazon planet.
• The Future: The main setting of the series, 1,000 years after the present day.
• Future Badass: Lars Fillmore in Bender's Big Score. Not actually a badass, nor technically from the future, but he is a look at a much, much more mature version of a present-day character.
• Future Imperfect: People in the year 3000 have lost a lot of knowledge of humanity's past, put on display as early as "The Series Has Landed" where Ralph Kramden is mistaken for a pioneer in lunar exploration because of his Character Catchphrase "BANG! ZOOM! Straight to the moon!!" This tends to bother Fry.
  Fry: That's not an astronaut, it's a TV comedian! And he was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife!
• Futuristic Superhighway: All cars are hovercars, so there are skylanes along with regular ground roads. In "Bendin' in the Wind" the Golden Gate Bridge is now a hoverbridge, so it doesn't need an actual road on it... which is a problem, since the gang is on a 20th Century VW Microbus. Intergalactic trucking routes and railroads are also present, and "Rebirth," the first episode after the series was Un-Cancelled, features the Panama Wormhole.

G

• Gaia's Lament: Played for laughs. Pine trees, anchovies, cows, and poodles are extinct. Owls replace pigeons and rats as urban pests. Jungles exist on Mars but not Earth, and global warming was solved by dropping a piece of ice in the ocean every now and then. It was later solved by pushing the Earth away from the sun. In another episode, Global Warming was said to be solved with the nuclear winter.
• Gambit Roulette: Spoofed by the Don Bot in "The Silence of the Clamps".
  Don Bot: I knew Bender would turn up purely by coincidence.
• Gasp!: Done all the time.
• Gay Aesop: "Proposition Infinity" has a very blatant one.
• Geeky Turn-On: "Dirty boy! Dirty, dirty, dirty!"
• Gender Bender: Done with Bender himself. Of course, how robots have genders shouldn't matter. Rule of Funny and all that.
  • Done to all characters in the episode "Neutopia".
• Gender Incompetence: Subverted. While at first it seems that Women Are Wiser and can be trusted to do their jobs and the men are unreliable failures, things turn out to be more balanced as we get to know the cast better. Leela, for example, can generally be considered the most responsible and sensible of the crew. However, she can occasionally be as crazy and immature as everyone else. Fry, on his part, is functionally retarded^note as a result of of lacking a Delta Brainwave, which is a straight inconvenience whenever the Brainspawn aren't a factor in whatever the current plot is. Hermes is genuinely competent, Bender is quite intelligent but totally amoral, the Professor has a brilliant mind, but one afflicted by senility and borderline insanity, Amy is a Genius Ditz, and even Zoidberg has his rare moments of insight despite being an utter loser.
• General Failure: Zapp Brannigan.
• Genius Breeding Act: In one episode, a Genius Breeding Act is referenced from a time when aliens landed on Earth and forced the smartest members to mate continuously. Farnsworth was disappointed that the latest alien invasion wasn't going to involve this.
• Genius Ditz:
  • Amy is an ABSOLUTE Ditz. However, as the episode "That Darn Katz" reminds us, she IS an engineering graduate student who designs a machine to harness the rotational energy of the Earth. Also, she officially gains her doctorate at the end of the episode, so she is the ultimate Genius Ditz.
  • Dr. Zoidberg. Even though he's the staff Doctor, he knows absolutely nothing about the Human Anatomy. We later find out that he IS a doctor - of Art History. What's more impressive is that there were a couple of occasions where Zoidberg actually performed operations successfully. Impressive, considering he doesn't actually have any medical training. He may not know anything about human anatomy, but he is a terrific alien Doctor.
  • Despite being an Idiot Hero, Fry is a very strange variation of Genius Ditz, in that sometimes he does things ridiculously well to the point of brilliance (e.g. writing a symphony, driving the ship and shooting at a chasing car of robot mafia at the same time, and re-arranging an entire galaxy with a gravitational array to write Leela a love message). Also, when he decides to become a police officer, he is shown to actually be quite competent.
• Genre-Busting: Futurama is a sitcom/buddy comedy/sociopolitical satire with Worldbuilding and detail comparable to the best science-fiction and fantasy fiction, deconstructing almost every science-fiction plot and trope inside out over the course of its run. The comedy goes from physical comedy to Black Comedy and Cringe Comedy, and the tone has enough Mood Whiplash that it can be simultaneously hilarious and horrific (as in "The Six Million Dollar Mon" and "Murder on the Planet Express").
• Genre Shift:
  • The first two seasons were pure comedy, with little emotional investment in the characters. Starting from the third season, they put some emotional pathos into Fry and Leela's relationship and had a couple twist endings that really made you feel something, the most famous examples being "The Late Philip J. Fry," "Jurassic Bark," and "The Luck of the Fryrish." This was done the most in Season 4, which is why it's often considered the best season.
  • In a different sense, the early episodes were mostly along the lines of a futuristic sitcom, where the humor comes from how the future is not that much different from the modern day. The science fiction gradually became as deep and resonant as the best science-fiction by Philip K. Dick and others, albeit treated comically, and episodes like "The Late Philip J. Fry," "Prisoner of Benda" and the (now) series finale "Meanwhile" touch on many of these themes.
• Get a Room!: Bender shouts this at an offscreen couple while he, Fry and Leela are climbing up the Watergate hotel. When one of them replies that they're in a room, he tells them to lose some weight.
• Get Back to the Future: "Roswell That Ends Well".
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: In the episode "Bendin' in the Wind", when Farnsworth asks Fry if the VW van has a device that can slow down and speed up time, Fry holds up a bong, prompting a shocked look from Hermes. According to DVD commentary, the reason the censors didn't object to the scene was because the script referred to the bong as a "strange bottle."
• Giant Woman: One episode features a whole planet of 16 ft tall Amazonian women who kill men via lap dances that, due to the women's size, crush their pelvises or "snu snu" (a.k.a. having sex until the guy dies of exhaustion).
• Gilligan Cut: Used, along with most other cut gags, in "Time Keeps on Skippin'"
  Leela: Fry, stop. I don't wanna hurt you, but there is absolutely positively no way that you and I will ever, ever— [time skip]
  Preacher: —man and wife. You may kiss the bride.
  • In "The Mutants Are Revolting", the crew stumbles upon a bus filled with skeletons of dead people. When Zoidberg shoves the bones off of a bed, the Professor scolds Zoidberg for desecrating the bones of the dead people. However, when Amy says that she found a safe, cut to Farnsworth using a skull to break into the safe.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Titanius Anglesmith (Bender) and Greyfarn's (Farnsworth) opinion on Leegola (Leela) and Gynecaladriel (Amy) making out in Bender's Game.
  Titanius Anglesmith: Ah, can it wait a couple of minutes?
  Greyfarn: Yes, yes it can.
  • Bender and Fry watching Amy wash the Planet Express Ship, aka Bender's current girlfriend (quite literally Cargo Ship).
  • Humorously subverted in the episode "Put Your Head on My Shoulders:"
    Fry: Now that I'm single, I'll attract all sorts of women.
    Amy: Actually, with my body, you'll only attract one kind of woman.
    Fry: [intrigued] Ohhh. [realizes, and then disappointed] Oh.
• God Guise:
  • In "Godfellas", Bender ends up drifting in space, where he becomes God to the Shrimpkins, a race of miniature people who end up settling on his body.
  • The episode "A Tale of Two Santas" gives us Zoidberg claiming to be Jesus and dressing up appropriately, for absolutely no reason and with little consequence.
• Godly Sidestep:
  • After learning that Nibblonians have been around since the dawn of time, Leela asks them about the creation. After seconds of untranslated Niblonian gibberish, Leela exclaims "That means every religion is wrong!"
  • In "Overclockwise", Bender temporarily achieves omniscience, and obtains printouts with the answers to life's great questions. He casually throws away "the reason we exist", but does show Fry and Leela an account of their future together.
  • Godfellas is this trope in compact-episode form. Bender becomes a god, fails horribly, meets something that might be God, and then proceeds to learn the ultimate godly lesson:
    Entity: If you've done it right, people won't be sure if you've done anything at all.
• Going Critical: Better than most shows, but in "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular", Grandma's fruitcake reaches critical mass when thrown into Santa's sleigh, creating a small mushroom cloud.
• Going to Give It More Energy: The Planet Express crew tries this against the Star Trek-loving Energy Being Melllvar. It doesn't work...
  Leela: Hmm... If we can re-route engine power through the primary weapons and configure them to Melllvar's frequency, that should overload his electro-quantum structure.
  Bender: Like putting too much air in a balloon!
  ...
  Leela: It's not working! He's gaining strength from our weapons!
  Fry: Like a balloon and... something bad happens!
• Gonky Femme: The Crushinator, a huge blocky robot with a masculine voice treated as a delicate beauty by Bender, she then goes to Miss Universe as Miss Earth Moon.
• Good News, Bad News: Whenever the professor says, "Good news, everyone!", he's inevitably going to announce something horrible. Parodied in one episode when he's announcing something even worse than normal and simply says "News, everyone!" in exactly the same tone of voice as normal and lampshaded in "The Sting" when he says (in exactly the same tone of voice as normal) "Bad news everyone! Now normally when I say "Good news" it's usually bad news. So, you can imagine how bad this news actually is." Also, in another episode, the Professor purchases some IKEA πKEA science instruments which... go exactly how you'd expect them to. He is blown through the wall into the next room. As he stands up, he says "Bad news, no one."
  • In the "Freaky Friday" Flip, he and Amy try to switch to their original bodies. When they fail, he says "Bad news, me."
• Good Night, Sweet Prince: Mentioned twice on the "Anthology of Interest" episodes (both at the end of an act one story where Bender ends up dead — in Anthology of Interest 1, Bender gets impaled on a skyscraper. In Anthology of Interest 2, Bender [who has been turned human] kills himself with excess eating, drinking, and partying).
  • In "The Cyber House Rules", Bender says something like this to his adopted kids.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: The Planet Express crew rarely smoke... except for Bender. Also, Mom and her cigarettes.
  • Notably in the episode in which Bender joins the Ultimate Robot Fighting League, one of his opponents is a cigarette-smoking robot who taunts the audience that, after the match, he's going to their favorite restaurant. Bender celebrates his victory by lighting a cigar. No one cares.
• Grammar Correction Gag: Multiple examples. Happens frequent with robot mafia henchman Joey Mousepad, whose mangled English is a Running Gag.
  • From "Love and Rocket":
    Lrr (Ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8!): "THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!"
  • From: "Bendless Love"
    Joey Mousepad: But what if management remains intragnizent?
    The Donbot: From the context it is clear what you mean.
• Grand Finale: The series has had four different episodes intended to act as this in case it didn't get renewed: the last episode of the original run, the last movie, the last episode of Production Season 6 (which was produced before they were renewed for a 7th production season^note the show's renewal was confirmed several months before the episode aired) and the last episode of Production Season 7.
  • The first one was "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings", which was notable for featuring music more prominently than any other episode in the series. It ended with badly made holophonor images of Fry and Leela walking off into the sunset holding hands.
  • The second one was Into the Wild Green Yonder. They really tried with the ending, which had a cliffhanger of the crew about to hit a wormhole, but they just got blasted back to Earth when the series restarted on Comedy Central.
  • The third was "Overclockwise". It ended with Fry and Leela looking at a paper with the future of their relationship and smiling.
  • The fourth is the episode "Meanwhile," which ended the Comedy Central run and left the show dormant for another decade.
• Grand Romantic Gesture: Fry pulls off one so big Leela decides to marry him. Unfortunately, time skips over the gesture itself and neither of them can remember what it is. It turns out to be a love note... written with stars Fry rearranged in space.
• Granola Girl: Done to death in Into the Wild Green Yonder.
• Grapes of Luxury: Hedonism-bot. He appears to be made for it.
• Grade System Snark: Apparently, within the lecture halls of Mars University, specifically the Twentieth-Century History class Fry, Amy, and Gunter, a chimpanzee whose intelligence was greatly enhanced due to a bowler hat that absorbed the energy of sun spots in "Mars University", each individual seat is rigged to electrocute any student who makes a snide or incredibly stupid remark, calls out of turn, or gets a question wrong. It doesn't help that the professor in charge of that particular class was thick on the sarcasm.
• Green Aesop: Parodied in "The Bird-Bot of Ice-Catraz" and "Leela and the Genestalk". In the former, Free Waterfall Sr. is dead set on saving the lives of Antarctica's threatened penguin population until he learns the birds are breeding out of control, at which point he organizes a cull to kill them in the most agonizing ways imaginable. In the latter, while it's shown that Mom's agribusiness holdings are run purely for her own greed than any sort of charitable motivation, they have managed to cure various diseases and breed fast-growing crops (which, by the end, have totally blanketed New New York).
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: "Benderama", interestingly enough. The giant starts smashing up everything, only because he has some self-esteem and anger issues, and everyone is insulting him. Everyone except Bender is entirely drunk and so can't really be held accountable, and while Bender stops the giant, he really was the only sober one and isn't any better than everyone else drunk:
  Bender: Let this be a lesson about attacking those more handsome than oneself.
• Grey Goo: Done with the infinitely replicating Benders, which even drop the trope name. They only thing saving the world was the Benders' collective laziness. The do leave behind significant damage before leaving to avoid doing even a minuscule fraction of a thing.
• Great Way to Go: Several. Fry tends to be a part.
• Groin Attack: Subverted in "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" when an unwilling Fry must duel Zoidberg for the claw of the lovely Edna:
  Zoidberg: I want the tactile pleasure of chopping him right here, in the gonads! [points approximately to Fry's collarbone]
  Fry: Nobody correct him!
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The final episode of season 7 has one in the form of a device with a single button Farnsworth made that can send the person back in time ten seconds, and explicitly takes ten seconds to recharge so you can't just continue to go back in time further by repeatedly pressing it. To actually show its effects to other people he created a "time shelter," so others won't be affected by the time jump. Breaking the device created a Time Stands Still situation for Fry and Leela, who live into old age together with the rest of the universe frozen, until Farnsworth was able to do a literal Reset Button.
• Guilt-Induced Nightmare: In "The Sting", Fry is apparently killed on a mission to collect space honey, and Leela blames herself because she deliberately ignored all the signs of danger for the sake of her pride. She ends up having a series of far-out dreams in which Fry seems to be trying to communicate with her from the other side.
• Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty: In the "The Lesser of Two Evils" episode, Fry and Leela automatically assume Flexo stole a giant atom. The two of them are only convinced of Flexo's innocence once the atom was shown inside Bender's compartment, showing that Bender was the real thief.

H

• Hair-Trigger Explosive: Fry is carrying sticks of dynamite, and each time one fell off it exploded. Fry makes it to the storage shed, there's a big explosion inside, and Fry emerges singed. Of course, the whole point of dynamite is that it doesn't explode unless detonated, so this was strictly Rule of Funny.^note Older dynamite can act in this manner, as the nitroglycerin will eventually "sweat" out of the stick, becoming exceptionally dangerous.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Like The Simpsons, Futurama also used these, though they were mainly only prevalent in the earlier seasons. "Hell is Other Robots" features two Halfway Plot Switches: The episode first mainly revolves around Bender's antics to maintain his electricity addiction, then it switches to Fry and Leela trying to get Bender to go back to his old self after he finds religion, and then it switches to the two of them busting Bender out of Robot Hell.
• Hammerspace: Bender often stores objects inside his chest cavity which really shouldn't fit.
• Hand Wave: "I thought that machine made (plastic) noses?" "It can do other things. Why shouldn't it?" (Granted, that all makes perfect sense.)
• Handcuffed Briefcase: In Bender's Big Score, Professor Farnsworth's doomsday device, kept within a briefcase bag, is directly handcuffed to him in order to prevent it from being stolen. Bender later gets around this by sawing the Professor's hand off.
• Hands Looking Wrong: In "Leela and the Genestalk," Leela first notices her transformation into a mass of tentacles when her hands grow suction cups, causing her to get stuck holding onto things.
• Handy Feet: In most of his speaking roles, the Number Nine Man gestures and occasionally grasps objects with his feet.
• Hanging Judge: Judge Whitey. Makes sense as he considers being poor a "mental illness" and will have people locked up accordingly.
• Haplessly Hiding: In "Decision 3012", President Nixon tasks Bender with getting dirt on political rival Chris Travers. While going through his file cabinet, Bender hears him coming and disguises himself as a bathroom urinal; Travers goes in and notices all the other urinals are out of order.
  Nixon: Well, you did manage to get a tremendous urine sample.
  Bender: [traumatized] Let's not talk about that.
• Happily Married: Leela's parents, although they did once divorce, but that lasted all of one episode.
  • Amy's parents, though her mother was willing to leave her father after they lost their buggalo herd.
  • Fry's parents. Also, Hermes and La Barbara Conrad, usually.
• Happy Birthday to You!: In "I Second That Emotion", the crew celebrates Nibbler's birthday by singing, "What day is today? It's Nibbler's birthday! What a day for a birthday, let's all have some cake". Fry then adds, "and you smell like one too".
• Haute Cuisine Is Weird: In the episode "Three Hundred Big Boys", Zoidberg spends his $300 refund on foie gras and caviar but is disappointed to find out that it's just goose liver and fish eggs. Chef Elzar tells him that "This is what rich people eat: the garbage parts of food."
• Have I Mentioned I Am Sexually Active Today?: Zapp Brannigan is one of the page quotes.
• He Knows Too Much: When the crew is throwing away their "overly complicated Japanese toilet", it offers them "Happy Poopy Time" if they'll spare it. Fry responds with this trope.
• Heads or Tails?: In one episode, the main characters enter an alternate universe where coin flips have opposite results causing decisions to be different.
• Heart Beats out of Chest: Exaggerated in the episode "Reincarnation", where Fry's heart pops out so far that it keeps hitting Bender in the back until it comes out of Bender's chest.
• The Hedonist
  • The aptly named Hedonism Bot.
  • Bender, being a robot without any sort of physiology to deal with, descends into this frequently. This is taken to a logical extreme during the second "Anthology of Interest" compilation where he's turned into a human. Still not fully understanding the limits of his now-human body, he continues his indulgent lifestyle and becomes a morbidly obese blob of flesh that ultimately dies from his condition at the end of the segment (although not without inciting a huge party at the Academy of Science first).
• Heinousness Retcon: During the Fox seasons, Fry's parents were depicted as quite cold and emotionally abusive, with his father berating him and his mother ignoring him in favor of sports. When Fry initially learns he'll never see his family again in the pilot, he cheers. Even when Fry's mom says she misses him in a flashback, she also remarks that all his "crap" is still in the house. The first movie and episodes in the later Comedy Central seasons depict Fry's experiences with his family as much happier. "Cold Warriors" still depicts Fry's dad as harsh but gives him the excuse of trying to toughen Fry up through tough love. "Game of Tones" is much more sentimental, as Fry gets to relive the last day he spent with his family; he has such a lovely time that he doesn't want to leave them, especially his mother. In the end, Fry ends up in his mother's dream, and it's made more obvious that she still loves him.
• Hellevator: In Robot Hell. There's also a slide.
• Hello, Attorney!: "Single Female Lawyer"
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": Melllvar's Author Avatar is the classic example of this in his FanFic.
  Shatner: [reading aloud in bored monotone] Alas, my ship, whom I love like a woman, is... disabled. [to self] Oh, Lord!
  Nimoy: [reading aloud in bored monotone] Fascinating, Captain, and logical too. Yet we need some help.
  Takei: [reading aloud in bored monotone] Look, Captain, Melllvar will help us.
  [A little later]
  Nichols: [reading aloud in bored monotone] My, what a handsome energy creature you are. I love you.
• Hermaphrodite: This is Hermes' actual name (but pronounced "Herm-Aphrodite"^note Which is technically the correct (the best kind of correct!) pronunciation of that word as a proper name) when he is turned into a centaur with breasts in the third movie, "Bender's Game".
• Heroic BSoD: Bender enters this combined with Roaring Rampage of Revenge, of all things, after realizing he was built without a backup unit, and therefore is both imperfect and mortal.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Bender.
• Heroic Fire Rescue: Fry (whose consumption of 100 cups of coffee has momentarily given him superpowers) rescues the patrons of a burning art exhibit (one at a time, using super speed).
• Heroic Host: Fry for the parasitic worms.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Slurms MacKenzie in "Fry and the Slurm Factory"; the parrot, possibly unintentionally, in "X-Mas Story".
  • Bender, of all robots, dives on a grenade for his fellows in "War is the H-Word". Being robustly constructed, he survives, and gets a field commission and a set of nifty wheels.
  • Fry attempts it several times (mostly for Leela). At least once, though ("The Sting"), it actually backfires.
  • Lars in Bender's Big Score (because he knows he's doomed anyway as a paradoxical duplicate of Fry).
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Fry and Bender.
• "Hey, You!" Haymaker something like this happened in "I Second that Emotion" one of Bender's arms tapped a foe on the shoulder, pointed in another direction, then the other arm punched said foe in the face.
• Hidden Depths: It's a very small example, but in "A Big Piece of Garbage", Fry knew the proper plural of "symposium" was "symposia". Other episodes also show him having a fairly good grasp of vocabulary despite his general lack of intelligence.
• High-Class Glass: Bender puts on a monocle to show how rich Fry becomes in the episode "A Fish Full of Dollars".
  Leela: I know Fry's rich, but do we really have to wear these top hats?
  Bender: Maybe you don't understand just how rich he is. In fact, I think I'd better put on a monocle.
• High Collar of Doom: The Omicronians.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: In the episode "Parasites Regained," the Planet Express crew shrinks down and ventures into Nibbler's litterbox, where there exists an orange powder that can expand one's mind, allowing them to see the complex web of species that exist within the litterbox, largely because Leela never cleans it out. The episode is partially a parody of the Dune franchise, with the sand of the litterbox correlating to the desert planet Arrakis, the presence of worms in both deserts, and the orange powder being a stand-in for the mind-expanding Spice.
• High Fantasy: The theme of the world Bender invents (and then everyone gets transported to) in Bender's Game.
• High-Five Left Hanging: In "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back'', the new bureaucrat Morgan Proctor, gives Fry the position of "Executive Delivery Boy" to the disdain of his co-workers. Fry tries to get Bender to hi-five him, but he initially refuses until Morgan orders him to. Though Fry goes for the down low, Bender kicks him in the leg.
• Hippie Van: In "Bendin' in the Wind", an ancient, abandoned VW bus is discovered. After Fry explains how it works, the crew get it repaired and go off on a hippie-themed road trip, following Beck on tour.
• Historical Character Confusion: Even after meeting Leonardo da Vinci in person, Fry keeps getting him mixed up with Leonardo DiCaprio.
• Historical In-Joke:
  • Where the whole "alien ship crashes in Roswell, NM" thing is "explained". Also, George W. Bush winning the 2000 US election in "Bender's Big Score".
  • In Decision 3012, Nixon displays a sign saying, "Kick him around for four more years," a reference to Nixon's real 1962 Goodbye Speech.
• Historical Domain Crossover: A Holodeck malfunction causes Amy and Kif to get attacked by Jack the Ripper, Attila the Hun, the fictional Professor Moriarty, and Evil Lincoln.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Double subverted in "The Late Philip J. Fry." Professor Farnsworth succeeds in assassinating Hitler when his time machine has to cycle through the death and rebirth of the universe, but they miss their intended time period and are forced to travel through time a second time. His haste this time around causes him to miss and assassinate Eleanor Roosevelt instead.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The worms in "Parasites Lost". They make Fry smarter and stronger, and he uses his newfound smarts and strength to get them to leave.
• Hold Up Your Score: The judges in the Miss Universe Pageant, with Zapp Brannigan instead holding up his room number.
• Holiday Personification: Around the holiday time, we see three beings who represent their respective reglious holidays: Robot Santa, who is made to be the physical version of Santa in the future, but as his faulty programming causes him to deem almost everyone as not only unworthy of receiving a gift, but also unworthy of life, he instead tries to kill anyone he sees on Xmas Eve, turning the holiday into a night of terror for anyone who doesn't hunker down. There's also Kwanzaa-Bot, who tries to give out books about the holiday since (according to the show) no one really knows what it celebrates, and "Bender's Big Score" showcased the Hanukkah Zombie who's a Jewish zombie.
• Holiday Volunteering: In the episode "Xmas Story", Bender volunteers at a Liquor Kitchen (for homeless robots) only to pose as a homeless robot himself and drinks all the free booze. In the end he invites some of the robots back to have X-Mas dinner with the rest of Planet Express.
• Hollywood Density:
  • Parodied as starship fuel (dark matter) is so dense that "a single pound of it weighs ten thousand pounds." In one case, Fry refers to a ball of this fuel, which has previously been shown on rare occasions to be liftable by a human, as "weighing as much as a thousand suns."
  • "Bender's Game" throws the dark matter's weight out the window by having the characters pushing wheelbarrows filled with it. On the sun.
  • A lampshade gets hung on this when Fry and Leela have a fiddle contest with the Robot Devil, where the prizes are Bender's soul and a solid gold fiddle. When Fry (of all people) asks "Wouldn't a solid gold fiddle weigh hundreds of pounds and sound crummy?" the Robot Devil admits that it's mostly for show, then (being a robot) takes it and plays a complicated piece on it.
  • Later in the episode, Bender grabs some wings and begins to fly out of Robot Hell carrying Fry and Leela. When Leela tells him he needs to fly faster, Bender replies that he could if Leela would drop the solid gold fiddle she was carrying (dented from hitting the Robot Devil over the head with it).
• Hollywood Economics: There's been zero inflation since Fry was frozen, so most things cost about the same as they did in 1999. But even though inflation somehow hasn't existed for the last thousand years, interest has, so the 93 cents Fry left in his bank account (briefly) turn him into a billionaire.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: In "Spanish Fry," Leela sings a warbly and off-key bit of Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You." Katey Sagal (besides being known as Peg Bundy and Turanga Leela) is a talented singer, and manages to convincingly sing badly.
• Holodeck Malfunction: Parodied to hell and back with the Holo-Shed in "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch".
  Holo-Lincoln: Real holographic-simulated Evil Lincoln is back!
  [later]
  Zapp: Damn, the last time that happened I was slapped with three paternity suits.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Literally: in "Hell is Other Robots" there's a robot hooker who has an actual heart of solid gold.
• Hopeless Suitor: Fry, so very much. He spends years trying to win Leela's affections, only for her to constantly reject him. She does eventually fall in love with him, and they become a couple in later seasons. It actually was the intention of the creators for Fry and Leela to never get together, until they saw how much fans like the relationship, something they didn't expect.
• Hospital Hottie:
  • Leela is once impressed with a handsome doctor, which makes her all flirty: "A tall doctor, you say?" His name is Adlai Atkins, and they grew up in the same orphanage. He's an eye surgeon, and it doesn't hurt that most doctors are rich.
  • The movie had a sexy young doctor named Dr. Cahill, (although Fry just called her Dr. Good and Sexy) who — despite her insistence that her attractive nature didn't make her a bimbo - was in fact a Brainless Beauty of a bimbo.
• Hospital Surprise: The premise of "The Sting" was the Planet Express crew looking to retrieve honey from space bees, only to have Fry die from being stung by a giant alien killer bee. A guilt-ridden Leela is convinced that Fry is still speaking to her somehow from beyond the grave, but as it turns out, she actually dreams it all while in a coma thanks to the bee's venom, and Fry has been at her bedside the whole time, begging her to Please Wake Up.
• Hover Bot: The new Robot 1-X is an advanced robot fueled off pollution and breathes out oxygen. It's a short torso-less robot that moves around by hovering.
• Hug and Comment:
  • Leela hugs Fry and mentions that "you smell like you've been rolling in New Jersey."
  • Another episode ends with the revelation that Leela has been comatose for weeks, and Fry has been at her side the whole time. They hug, and:
    Leela: You could really use a shower.
    Fry: You, too.
• Huge Holographic Head: Used several times, but most notably with Jorel, Master of Scheduling, who uses the system to make mundane announcements.
• Hugh Mann: The episode "A Taste of Freedom" provides the picture for this trope's page, due to the unconvincing crustacean in disguise (who's even named Hugh Mann) who fools Zapp Brannigan.
• Human Alien Discovery: Inverted. Leela always thought that she was an alien who had been abandoned by her parents, but eventually discovers that she has always been a human, albeit a mutant. Her parents left her at an orphanage and made her look like an alien because mutants are horribly discriminated against and since she could pass for an alien, they wanted to give her a better life.
• Human Popsicle: How Fry gets to the future in the first place.
• Humans Are Bastards: Spoofed with Show Within a Show The Scary Door:
  Scientist: I have combined the DNA of the world's most evil animals to make the most evil creature of them all!
  [A naked man walks out of the chamber]
  Naked Man: Turns out it's man.
• Humans Are Diplomats: Subverted. Earth is a member of DOOP, the 31st century equivalent of the United Nations, but humans are far from diplomatic: more often than not, they are engaged in Aggressive Negotiations and blatant Gunboat Diplomacy with those weaker than them.
• Humans Are Morons: The 20th Century is known as "The Stupid Age" to historians, but even in the 31st century, Earth is regarded as little more than a "primitive dirtball inhabited by psychotic apes".
• Humans Are Special: Parodied. In all the known universe, humans have accomplished a feat that no other species has done, and that even the ridiculously advanced and ancient Nibblonians are forced to concede: they invented the pizza bagel.
• Humans Need Aliens: Although Nibbler acts as a cute little pet most of the time, he in fact belongs to a powerful alien race and helps save Earth and humanity more than once.
• Hurl It into the Sun: Hermes and the box in "The Farnsworth Parabox". Also done with a shipment of popcorn kernels in "A Bicyclops Built for Two" and a shipment of candy hearts in "Love and Rocket", although in that episode it was a quasar instead of the sun.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: In "Spanish Fry", when Lrrr wants to steal Fry's "lower horn", Bender doesn't help matters by cracking penis jokes at every opportunity.
• Hurricane of Excuses:
  • When Farnsworth doesn't want to go to the Global Warming conference in "Crimes of the Hot".
  • Also, Leela, Bender, and Fry in "Less than Hero" (see I Need to Go Iron My Dog).
• Hurricane of Puns: Numerous examples, but the one that really takes the cake is the Lead In to "The Luck of the Fryrish", containing every joke imaginable about horse racing, and a joke about Quantum Physics.
• Hyperspace Lanes: The Panama Wormhole, Earth's central shipping channel.
• Hypnotic Eyes: THE HYPNOTOAD. This has reached the levels of Memet—ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD
• Hypocritical Humor: It's not rare to find a character stating that they will/won't do something after a little speech before they don't/do the thing they were/weren't going to do. For example:
  • In Bender's Game, following a particularly brutal Take That! to Robin Williams (in form of a horde of Morks, a combination of orcs and, well, Mork who can only repeat his catchphrases and are messily slain in great numbers for being annoying) for supposedly not being funny, we are subjected to The Eviscerator, which seems like the exact kind of joke Williams would make in his stand-up routine.
  • "That Darn Katz" has Nibbler claiming that nothing acts cute without an ulterior motive. Even keeping in mind his actions through the entire series, he follows this up by acting cute to trick Amy into changing his diaper.
  • "Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!"
  • "Fry, I hereby promote you to executive delivery boy!" "It's a meaningless title, but it helps insecure people feel better about themselves." ...Executive Producers: Matt Groening, David X. Cohen.
    Fry: I feel better about myself!
  • From "Xmas Story":
    Farnsworth: You should be ashamed of yourself, Fry. You'd have to be blind not to notice that Leela's a cyclops.
    [zoom out to reveal Hermes]
    Hermes: Fry's over there, mon.
    Farnsworth: Oh? *adjusts his glasses*
  • When Farnsworth reunites with a now elderly Fry and Leela at the end of "Meanwhile", he says "Boy, did somebody hit you two with an old-and-ugly-stick!"
  • In "I Dated a Robot", Bender vehemently admonishes Fry for dating a robot but at the end he has no problem forming a relationship with Lucy Liu's head, even calling Fry's objections prudish.
  • In "Less Than Hero," Bender, in his new superhero persona as Super King, proudly states that he's the best one of the three. When he, Fry, and Leela go on their first superhero mission together, this happens:
    [while Fry and Leela run out heroically, Bender runs slowly and heavily panting like he just ran a whole marathon]
    Bender: Hold the elevator for me!

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