Mayor Poopenmayer

Poopenmayer holds the thankless job of mayor of New New York, which mostly means standing at podiums looking faintly overwhelmed while the city's latest catastrophe unfolds behind him. He wants order and dignity, gets neither, and answers reporters' questions with the weary patience of a man who has given up expecting good news.

He's a background gag elevated by that name alone, and David Herman plays him with just enough bureaucratic exasperation to make every brief appearance land. Futurama's genius is treating its silliest joke-characters as real fixtures of civic life, and Poopenmayer is the deadpan proof — never the punchline's subject, always its delivery.