Emperor Nikolai

Nikolai holds the title of Emperor within Futurama's sprawling universe of minor rulers and bureaucrats, the kind of figure the crew encounters when some faraway world's politics briefly collide with their own. He carries himself with the stiff formality of inherited power, more concerned with protocol and status than with the chaos unfolding around him.

David Herman, already doing heavy lifting elsewhere in the cast, brings his knack for deadpan authority to a character who exists mostly to be self-important in a universe that refuses to take anyone seriously. The joke is always the gap between the title and the indignity Futurama inevitably visits upon it.