Academy Awards Announcer

A booming, unseen voice presiding over Futurama's send-up of Hollywood self-importance, the Academy Awards Announcer exists purely to intone nominees and categories with absurd, overblown gravity. He wants nothing for himself — he's pure ceremony, all pomp, narrating the moment with the solemnity of a man announcing the end of the world.

Maurice LaMarche's voice is the joke: that deep, honeyed movie-trailer baritone applied to Futurama's ridiculous future-world awards nonsense, deadpan and utterly sincere. The gag lands because he never winks at it — the more self-serious the delivery, the funnier the absurdity underneath, a tiny bit that rewards you for recognizing the voice itself as a parody instrument.