George Washington's Head

Preserved in a jar of bubbling fluid at the Head Museum, George Washington's Head is the first President of the United States reduced to a talking bust in a glass tank. He speaks with grave, founding-father solemnity about duty and country, seemingly unbothered that he is now, quite literally, just a head.

The joke is entirely in the mismatch: Maurice LaMarche gives him the sonorous, statesmanlike gravity of a Mount Rushmore bust, and the show never once acknowledges how absurd that is coming from a jar. Deadpan dignity applied to a ridiculous premise is Futurama's whole comic engine, and this is one of its purest, silliest distillations.