Cuckoo

Cuckoo is the ominous little robotic voice that turns up around Bender's haunting in "The Honking," a cuckoo-clock spirit dispensing cryptic warnings from the shadows. It doesn't want conversation so much as dread — every appearance is a portent, delivered with theatrical relish rather than friendliness.

Maurice LaMarche treats a novelty prop like a Shakespearean apparition, and the gap between the silly cuckoo-clock design and his booming, doom-laden delivery is the entire joke. It's Futurama's horror-parody instincts distilled into one bit part: gleefully overplayed, and funnier the straighter he plays it.