Myrtle Fu

Myrtle Fu turns up as one of Futurama's parade of one-scene New New Yorkers, a brisk, no-nonsense presence who says her piece and moves on. She is efficient, faintly exasperated, and treats the show's absurdities as just another Tuesday, which is exactly the joke.

She works because Tress MacNeille never plays a bit part as filler; she gives Myrtle Fu a clipped, specific cadence that makes a few lines feel like a whole life offscreen. The character sticks less for who she is than for how completely she sells the show's deadpan universe.