Character
Humorbot 5.0
Humorbot 5.0 in Futurama (1999), played by Billy West.
Humorbot 5.0 turns up as one of Futurama's endless supply of single-purpose robots, this one built to judge comedy. It has no sense of humor of its own, only a diagnostic ability to grade jokes for structure and technique, delivering verdicts in a flat, official voice regardless of whether anyone actually laughed.
The joke is the premise itself: a machine appointed to certify what's funny, sincerely applying clinical rigor to something that can't survive clinical rigor. Billy West plays it perfectly deadpan, so the gap between Humorbot's solemn technical pronouncements and the silliness onscreen becomes the punchline, a tiny satire of humor-by-committee.
Humorbot 5.0 is robot comedian and talk show host. Although presumably built to perform comedy, Humorbot 5.0 had to work his way up the comedy circuits, and as late as 3002 was still performing in amateur nights in comedy clubs such as The Comedy Simulator. But within a year, Humorbot 5.0 had made it big when he scored his own television talk show aimed at a robot audience; Late Night with Humorbot 5.
Played by
Appears in
Futurama1999