Season 1, Episode 8: "A Big Piece of Garbage" (B+)
Sept 28, 2014 0:41:59 GMT -5
Albert Fish Taco, Arthur Dent, and 2 more like this
Post by Deleted on Sept 28, 2014 0:41:59 GMT -5
It’s an episode Mittens the Kitten won’t soon forget!
Watching the eighth episode of Futurama, it’s easy to see why the network executives were confused and frightened by the show they had initially greenlit for no reason other than that the creator’s previous show had made them an ongoing and ever larger pile of money. Yes, we’ve already seen the dark jokes about “Suicide Booths” and black-market organ transplants, and we’ve gotten accustomed to one of the main characters being an alcoholic, kleptomaniac robot who dreams of killing all humans… But this episode crystallizes the blend of high-minded cleverness, gleeful crudeness, and pointed satire that make Futurama both one of the finest sitcoms of all time, and very much a love-it-or-hate-it proposition for mainstream audiences.
This is, after all, an episode which swings from a string of jokes about academia, grade inflation, and senility in one scene, to anatomical puns and jokes about foul odors in the next. It starts with a joke about symposia, makes a joke about the quality of “acting” in pornography, delves into social satire with an environmental message, before undermining it all with a typically Futurama implication that no matter how technologically advanced we become, humankind is going to stay as venal and short-sighted as ever. This is not the easiest blend of humor for mass audiences to digest.
The typical formula for mass-market “smart” humor typically depends on some combination of self-congratulation and populist take-downs. Frasier, one of my favorite shows of the 90’s, relied less on making good jokes out of high-toned references, than on poking fun at the pomposity of those who made them. Typically, an episode would see the erudite brothers Crane getting into some sort of conundrum or conflict brought on by either overthinking, or trying to impress their peers, only to be set “right” by the end by the down-to-earth wisdom of their Father, his home aide, or Frasier’s vulgar co-worker.
The current alleged champion of “smart” comedy on network TV, The Big Bang Theory plays more like some hideous, misbegotten update of “The Revenge of the Nerds” in which the few jokes that don’t depend on us laughing at how socially inept and unattractive the well-educated are, instead depend on the joke being explained in detail so that, just in case you didn’t get the references, you can now pretend that you did and feel like you’re truly someone special, getting that “smart” joke. Of course, it’s well known that explaining a joke is the best way to suck all enjoyment out of it, but the “enjoyment” to be gotten out of The Big Bang Theory has nothing to do with actually getting any of its ostensibly high-minded jokes, but rather being able to congratulate one’s self with having possibly heard about that thing that they just explained they were mentioning one time, you think. Frasier, at least, had the benefit of well-crafted jokes, fully-realized characters, and letting the “smart” jokes it made stand on their own.
Futurama never pauses to wonder if the audience followed a joke or got a reference. The show is confident in both itself, and in the people who watch it. When the Mayor of New New York says he has to make sure, “This isn’t another scientific fraud like global warming or second-hand smoke,” Futurama trusts that we’re smart enough to know how well-evidenced those phenomena are, and how ridiculous and unbelievable it would be for them to be “frauds”. There is no explanation, there is no worry that some viewers might take it as a straight-faced statement representing the show’s beliefs.
Futurama falls into the tradition of shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which are as at home making jokes or puns only one in a thousand people might get, and making lewd, crude, obscene jokes that any fourth grade boy would delight in; never dwelling on any disconnect between the two extremes. After all, even geniuses break wind. Geniuses also, as this episode demonstrates, have petty rivalries, watch porn, go senile, and can both come up with a plan for saving the world, and blow the most basic element of implementing that plan by reading a diagram upside-down.
The episode is a showcase for Billy West’s Professor, and also for supporting player David Herman, playing both Mayor Poopenmeyer and The Professor’s nemesis, Ogden Wernstrom. The rivalry between the two, which would become one of the great recurring side-relationships on the show, opens a rich vein of humor both about the frailties of the old, and the absurdities of academia. As someone who grew up in an academic household, few early Futurama exchanges tickled my funny bone like the following between the Mayor and Wernstrom:
Poopenmeyer: Dr. Wernstrom, can you save my city?
Wernstrom: Of course. But it'll cost you. First I'll need tenure.
Poopenmeyer: Done.
Wernstrom: And a big research grant.
Poopenmeyer: You got it.
Wernstrom: Also, access to a lab and five graduate students, at least three of them Chinese.
Poopenmeyer: Um, alright done. What's your plan?
Wernstrom: What plan? I'm set for life! Au revoir, suckers!
Of course, Wernstrom can’t help himself from gloating, and hoping to lord it over another one of The Professor’s failures, leading him to stick around for the last-ditch attempt to save New New York. When The Professor claims his calculations, if correct, show that the plan should work, Wernstrom retorts, “If my calculations are correct, we're all going to die horribly,” only realizing after a short maniacal laugh that “we” also includes himself.
The counterpoint to all the episode’s environmental commentary and jokes about academia is that the impending crisis threatening the city is brought on by a giant ball of lost garbage from the 20th Century, discovered by The Professor’s “Smelloscope” invention. After an abortive attempt to blow up the garbage-steroid (to coin my own term), and some glancing references to Armageddon (none so specific as to be unfunny as the movie fades into deserved obscurity), Fry is pressed into service to teach the 31st Century how to make pile of garbage big enough to deflect the one headed straight for them at millions of miles per hour.
We learn that Fry’s been eating recycled sandwiches and spent a month defecating into a garbage can when his toilet broke, we see citizens dumping dirty litter boxes out their windows, and learn that just by flipping it over, a picture of your wife can be turned into “pure garbage.” There’s also a wonderful interlude with a movie found on the internet explaining how the ball of garbage got shot into space in the first place (it involved a barge named “Fun in the Sun”, the city’s mob connections, a rocket, and a mayor who looks suspiciously like Rudy Giuliani). Of course, just as in the present, the internet is used for looking up porn, as demonstrated by the movie descending into poorly-acted smut as soon as the point has been made (Maurice LaMarche’s delivery of, “Wit’ gusto,” in response to, “Now that the, uh, gah-bage is in space, doctah, perhaps you can help me with my sexual inhibitions,” is a thing of beauty).
The show’s reluctance to congratulate its audience on “getting” it extends right through to the end, when Leela points out that this is just another temporary solution, only to be confidently dismissed by Fry, who’s happy to see that the “20th Century attitude” of not worrying about the fate of people hundreds of years in the future has been picked up by everyone else present. It’s an echo of the earlier porno’s discussion of how, “Some experts claimed the ball might return to earth someday, but their concerns were dismissed as ‘depressing’.”
And that, my friends, is why I went to the People’s Climate March last weekend. When the history of this era is written, I want it to be known that I stood with the people with the depressing concerns!
GRADE: B+
This Week’s Opening:
“Mr. Bender’s Wardrobe by ROBOTANY 5000”
This Week In Futurama Signage:
The Academy Of Inventors’ seal features the following great inventions:
-The Lightbulb
-The Wheel
-The Mousetrap
-The Spray-On Toupee
Stray Observations:
-I love the joke about grade inflation, with an “A-minus” being an insult, and the “worst grade imaginable” being an “A-minus… minus!” Suck it, Harvard.
This week’s guest star is Ron Popeil, who, in addition to inventing the Spray-On Toupee and Chop-O-Matic, also, apparently, invented the technology to keep human heads alive in jars.
-Wernstrom’s “Reverse Scuba Suit” for his pet fish, Cinnamon, results in the fantastic tableau of him beating the fish over the head with a newspaper when it fails to “sit” on command. The fish’s hang-dog expression is hilarious.
-Fine, here goes:
Fry: Oh, man, this is great! Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus!
Leela: I don't get it.
Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Farnsworth: Urectum.
-The animation of the Professor’s reaction to smelling the ball of garbage, exclaiming, “Whoof! Jeez! Oh man!” is just fantastic. As is his invention of The Funkometer.
-1999, and City Hall has been renamed CitiHall… A full decade and some before CitiBank took to sponsoring, and naming, NYC’s bike share service.
For the first time, we meet news anchors Linda and Morbo. Kittens, we learn, give Morbo gas.
-The Professor’s disregard for the life of his crew is on full display here, both in the cold open where he holds off on sending them to Ebola-9 so they can cheer him on at the awards banquet, and later when he shuffles them off to blow up the garbage ball telling them, “There’ll be plenty of time to discuss your objections when and if you return!”
-Speaking of high-minded references, the episode closes with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”, famously used over the closing apocalypse of <i>Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</i>.
Coming up next week: We’re all going to hell - Robot Hell, that is - in <i>Hell Is Other Robots</i>. If memory serves, that’s a fucking <i>great</i> one.
Watching the eighth episode of Futurama, it’s easy to see why the network executives were confused and frightened by the show they had initially greenlit for no reason other than that the creator’s previous show had made them an ongoing and ever larger pile of money. Yes, we’ve already seen the dark jokes about “Suicide Booths” and black-market organ transplants, and we’ve gotten accustomed to one of the main characters being an alcoholic, kleptomaniac robot who dreams of killing all humans… But this episode crystallizes the blend of high-minded cleverness, gleeful crudeness, and pointed satire that make Futurama both one of the finest sitcoms of all time, and very much a love-it-or-hate-it proposition for mainstream audiences.
This is, after all, an episode which swings from a string of jokes about academia, grade inflation, and senility in one scene, to anatomical puns and jokes about foul odors in the next. It starts with a joke about symposia, makes a joke about the quality of “acting” in pornography, delves into social satire with an environmental message, before undermining it all with a typically Futurama implication that no matter how technologically advanced we become, humankind is going to stay as venal and short-sighted as ever. This is not the easiest blend of humor for mass audiences to digest.
The typical formula for mass-market “smart” humor typically depends on some combination of self-congratulation and populist take-downs. Frasier, one of my favorite shows of the 90’s, relied less on making good jokes out of high-toned references, than on poking fun at the pomposity of those who made them. Typically, an episode would see the erudite brothers Crane getting into some sort of conundrum or conflict brought on by either overthinking, or trying to impress their peers, only to be set “right” by the end by the down-to-earth wisdom of their Father, his home aide, or Frasier’s vulgar co-worker.
The current alleged champion of “smart” comedy on network TV, The Big Bang Theory plays more like some hideous, misbegotten update of “The Revenge of the Nerds” in which the few jokes that don’t depend on us laughing at how socially inept and unattractive the well-educated are, instead depend on the joke being explained in detail so that, just in case you didn’t get the references, you can now pretend that you did and feel like you’re truly someone special, getting that “smart” joke. Of course, it’s well known that explaining a joke is the best way to suck all enjoyment out of it, but the “enjoyment” to be gotten out of The Big Bang Theory has nothing to do with actually getting any of its ostensibly high-minded jokes, but rather being able to congratulate one’s self with having possibly heard about that thing that they just explained they were mentioning one time, you think. Frasier, at least, had the benefit of well-crafted jokes, fully-realized characters, and letting the “smart” jokes it made stand on their own.
Futurama never pauses to wonder if the audience followed a joke or got a reference. The show is confident in both itself, and in the people who watch it. When the Mayor of New New York says he has to make sure, “This isn’t another scientific fraud like global warming or second-hand smoke,” Futurama trusts that we’re smart enough to know how well-evidenced those phenomena are, and how ridiculous and unbelievable it would be for them to be “frauds”. There is no explanation, there is no worry that some viewers might take it as a straight-faced statement representing the show’s beliefs.
Futurama falls into the tradition of shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which are as at home making jokes or puns only one in a thousand people might get, and making lewd, crude, obscene jokes that any fourth grade boy would delight in; never dwelling on any disconnect between the two extremes. After all, even geniuses break wind. Geniuses also, as this episode demonstrates, have petty rivalries, watch porn, go senile, and can both come up with a plan for saving the world, and blow the most basic element of implementing that plan by reading a diagram upside-down.
The episode is a showcase for Billy West’s Professor, and also for supporting player David Herman, playing both Mayor Poopenmeyer and The Professor’s nemesis, Ogden Wernstrom. The rivalry between the two, which would become one of the great recurring side-relationships on the show, opens a rich vein of humor both about the frailties of the old, and the absurdities of academia. As someone who grew up in an academic household, few early Futurama exchanges tickled my funny bone like the following between the Mayor and Wernstrom:
Poopenmeyer: Dr. Wernstrom, can you save my city?
Wernstrom: Of course. But it'll cost you. First I'll need tenure.
Poopenmeyer: Done.
Wernstrom: And a big research grant.
Poopenmeyer: You got it.
Wernstrom: Also, access to a lab and five graduate students, at least three of them Chinese.
Poopenmeyer: Um, alright done. What's your plan?
Wernstrom: What plan? I'm set for life! Au revoir, suckers!
Of course, Wernstrom can’t help himself from gloating, and hoping to lord it over another one of The Professor’s failures, leading him to stick around for the last-ditch attempt to save New New York. When The Professor claims his calculations, if correct, show that the plan should work, Wernstrom retorts, “If my calculations are correct, we're all going to die horribly,” only realizing after a short maniacal laugh that “we” also includes himself.
The counterpoint to all the episode’s environmental commentary and jokes about academia is that the impending crisis threatening the city is brought on by a giant ball of lost garbage from the 20th Century, discovered by The Professor’s “Smelloscope” invention. After an abortive attempt to blow up the garbage-steroid (to coin my own term), and some glancing references to Armageddon (none so specific as to be unfunny as the movie fades into deserved obscurity), Fry is pressed into service to teach the 31st Century how to make pile of garbage big enough to deflect the one headed straight for them at millions of miles per hour.
We learn that Fry’s been eating recycled sandwiches and spent a month defecating into a garbage can when his toilet broke, we see citizens dumping dirty litter boxes out their windows, and learn that just by flipping it over, a picture of your wife can be turned into “pure garbage.” There’s also a wonderful interlude with a movie found on the internet explaining how the ball of garbage got shot into space in the first place (it involved a barge named “Fun in the Sun”, the city’s mob connections, a rocket, and a mayor who looks suspiciously like Rudy Giuliani). Of course, just as in the present, the internet is used for looking up porn, as demonstrated by the movie descending into poorly-acted smut as soon as the point has been made (Maurice LaMarche’s delivery of, “Wit’ gusto,” in response to, “Now that the, uh, gah-bage is in space, doctah, perhaps you can help me with my sexual inhibitions,” is a thing of beauty).
The show’s reluctance to congratulate its audience on “getting” it extends right through to the end, when Leela points out that this is just another temporary solution, only to be confidently dismissed by Fry, who’s happy to see that the “20th Century attitude” of not worrying about the fate of people hundreds of years in the future has been picked up by everyone else present. It’s an echo of the earlier porno’s discussion of how, “Some experts claimed the ball might return to earth someday, but their concerns were dismissed as ‘depressing’.”
And that, my friends, is why I went to the People’s Climate March last weekend. When the history of this era is written, I want it to be known that I stood with the people with the depressing concerns!
GRADE: B+
This Week’s Opening:
“Mr. Bender’s Wardrobe by ROBOTANY 5000”
This Week In Futurama Signage:
The Academy Of Inventors’ seal features the following great inventions:
-The Lightbulb
-The Wheel
-The Mousetrap
-The Spray-On Toupee
Stray Observations:
-I love the joke about grade inflation, with an “A-minus” being an insult, and the “worst grade imaginable” being an “A-minus… minus!” Suck it, Harvard.
This week’s guest star is Ron Popeil, who, in addition to inventing the Spray-On Toupee and Chop-O-Matic, also, apparently, invented the technology to keep human heads alive in jars.
-Wernstrom’s “Reverse Scuba Suit” for his pet fish, Cinnamon, results in the fantastic tableau of him beating the fish over the head with a newspaper when it fails to “sit” on command. The fish’s hang-dog expression is hilarious.
-Fine, here goes:
Fry: Oh, man, this is great! Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus!
Leela: I don't get it.
Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Farnsworth: Urectum.
-The animation of the Professor’s reaction to smelling the ball of garbage, exclaiming, “Whoof! Jeez! Oh man!” is just fantastic. As is his invention of The Funkometer.
-1999, and City Hall has been renamed CitiHall… A full decade and some before CitiBank took to sponsoring, and naming, NYC’s bike share service.
For the first time, we meet news anchors Linda and Morbo. Kittens, we learn, give Morbo gas.
-The Professor’s disregard for the life of his crew is on full display here, both in the cold open where he holds off on sending them to Ebola-9 so they can cheer him on at the awards banquet, and later when he shuffles them off to blow up the garbage ball telling them, “There’ll be plenty of time to discuss your objections when and if you return!”
-Speaking of high-minded references, the episode closes with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”, famously used over the closing apocalypse of <i>Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</i>.
Coming up next week: We’re all going to hell - Robot Hell, that is - in <i>Hell Is Other Robots</i>. If memory serves, that’s a fucking <i>great</i> one.
